Around 40 individuals detained at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility — New York state’s largest immigrant detention center — went on a hunger strike to protest the facility’s policy and practice of locking people in their cells for approximately 18 hours per day, and the discontinuance of free phone calls.
ICE officials responded to the hunger strike by threatening and using physical force against the strikers, the strikers say in a newly filed civil rights complaint. ICE allegedly locked them in their cells for extended hours, and denied them access to their jobs, recreational activities, and the law library.
The groups that filed the federal civil rights complaint this week on behalf of the immigrants — Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, New York Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Justice for Migrant Families — are urging the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate the incident.
“ICE officials responded to this latest incident in an abusive and punitive manner because at BFDF, punitive confinement is the norm and civil confinement is the exception,” said Sarah Gillman, Director of Strategic U.S. Litigation at RFK Human Rights in a statement Documented received.
Locking people in their cells for 18 hours approaches the conditions of solitary confinement, which has severe medical consequences, research has shown. Typically, BFDF, as with other detention facilities in the U.S., allows detained individuals to engage in a voluntary work program that pays $1 a day for hours of labor.
In interviews with detained persons at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, a detainee said, “One of the people who was engaged in the hunger strike was forcibly removed from our unit in a device that looked like a straitjacket.” They said that detainee did not do anything when officers used force against him
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“He was just trying to verbally explain why we went on a hunger strike and in response he was physically removed from the unit. We have not seen him since June 7, 2024,” they said.
Amy Belsher, director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said “ICE’s abhorrent, punitive response to people advocating for their rights is not only inhumane – it’s unconstitutional.”
Belsher also said the agency’s actions exemplified a longstanding practice. “All people detained by ICE must be able to exercise their rights without repercussion or intimidation,” she said.
The groups that filed the complaint are requesting ICE to “immediately cease the policy and practice of blanket lock-ins for 18 hours; reinstate provision of free phone calls to family; cease the threat or use of force and threat or use of solitary confinement in retaliation for peaceful hunger strikes by individuals at BFDF.
Read the full federal civil rights complaint here, and a full statement from the groups here.
