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For Immediate Release
April, 29 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Resha Swanson, Adelante Alabama Worker Center, (573) 855-1766, resha@adelantealabama.org
Jen Nessel, Center for Constitutional Rights, (212) 614-6449, jnessel@ccrjustice.org
Sirine Shebaya, National Immigration Project, (202) 656-4788, sshebaya@nipnlg.org
Medically Vulnerable Immigrants Seek Emergency Release from ICE Detention in Alabama
Filing Follows COVID-19 Outbreaks and Similar Demands for Release Nationwide.
WASHINGTON
Late yesterday, Adelante Alabama Worker Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIP-NLG) filed an emergency petition and temporary restraining order for the release of medically vulnerable people currently held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. The filing seeks the release of 18 people being detained in Unit 9 of the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, and cites their severe risk of contracting the novel coronavirus COVID-19 and developing life-threatening symptoms. Other medically vulnerable immigrants have filed petitions for release in other states, with courts ordering releases from other ICE detention centers. The filings in each case warn that the near-certainty of coronavirus outbreaks in these facilities renders the continued detention of these individuals a potential death sentence for a civil immigration violation.
"I am scared of dying in here," said Bakhodir Madjitov, who has been detained since 2017. "What will my family do? When ICE suddenly detained me, my wife Madina was 39 weeks pregnant with my littlest child.... I have only ever seen my son once, through the glass at a detention center. I have never been able to hold him in my arms. My wife and three little boys were barely managing without me before COVID-19. Now, everything is much worse. Madina lost her job due to the pandemic, and now she says she has no idea how she will take care of the children."
The complaint and the declarations made by those imprisoned describe not only the impossibility of social distancing inside the Etowah jail--where up to four people are held in cramped six-by-six-foot cells--but also the growing issue of overcrowding, worsened by staff combining people being detained by ICE from two units to a single unit. New people continue to be brought into the jail, including some reportedly exposed to COVID-19. More than 100 people now share a single unit with communal showers, dining, and recreation areas. Toilets are inside the cells with no partition. Detained individuals report receiving inadequate or no cleaning and hygiene supplies, despite being required to clean their own cells. Some have used shampoo to clean cells. Those assigned to clean common areas have not been provided with protective gear.
"Etowah County Detention Center has built a national reputation as ICE's warehouse for prolonged detention, with conditions so abysmal they have compelled people to lose hope and accept deportation," Jessica Vosburgh, Executive and Legal Director at Adelante explained. "In the wake of COVID-19, the individuals caged in Etowah are not only fighting against their deportations, they are fighting for their lives."
According to declarations filed by infectious disease and public health experts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Yale, and Tulane, it is impossible for Etowah to comply with CDC guidelines around social distancing, quarantine, and treatment, and the jail's already inadequate medical facilities will inevitably be overwhelmed.
The 18 people filing this petition with the court, many of whom are seeking protection in the U.S. from violence, torture or persecution in their home countries, report extensive pre-existing health conditions that make them especially vulnerable to developing life-threatening COVID-19 infections. Such conditions include asthma so severe the prisoner has coughed up blood, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, chronic bronchitis and other lung conditions, and diabetes. Many of them take numerous medications to control pre-existing health issues, including some that suppress their immune systems. Even before the pandemic, ongoing health problems were allowed to fester with no or inadequate treatment; since the outbreak, detainees report that medical checkups for chronic conditions have been suspended. Attorneys say coronavirus has exacerbated already dire conditions in ICE facilities.
"While this suit seeks to protect these individuals from lethal harm, it is also part of a broader effort to expose the horrid conditions in ICE detention facilities and the vast, illegitimate detention system and cruel and arbitrary punitive reflex that pervades in this country," said Baher Azmy, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Local advocacy groups such as Shut Down Etowah are also calling for the release of ICE detainees, responding with several letters to Etowah County Sheriff Jonathan Horton and regional ICE Director Dianne Witte and staging a caravan protest outside the facility last week. Shut Down Etowah Organizer Lisa Moyer says, "This petition isn't just about securing the freedom of the 18 people detained in Unit 9. It's about every person trapped inside of Etowah County Detention Center, desperately hoping that the air they breathe won't put them in a casket." Shut Down Etowah has teamed up with regional bond organization Etowah Freedom Fund to start a COVID-19 emergency fund that will be used to provide commissary and bail money to people in detention.
"ICE's insistence on continuing to detain medically vulnerable people during a global pandemic is cruel and dangerous, and it shines a light on how needless immigration detention is in the first place," said Sirine Shebaya, Executive Director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. "Through this litigation, we hope to obtain release for our clients, but also to raise public awareness about the inhumane manner in which people in ICE detention are treated, and the bloated system of mass incarceration our immigration authorities are using taxpayer money to fund, in the face of all evidence that it is unnecessary and harmful to our communities."
The complaint filed today argues that the risk of death for a civil immigration violation--due to grossly inadequate sanitation and healthcare, along with the impossibility of following CDC guidelines in such over-crowded conditions--violates constitutional protections ensuring adequate care and preventing deliberate indifference to obvious medical risks. It also argues that those in the detention center are being denied their constitutional right to counsel, as visits are banned and the facilities lack practical means of placing confidential calls to lawyers.
Jeremy Jong in New Orleans is co-counsel in the case.
The case is Williams v. Horton and was filed in federal court in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
Link to Petition: https://adelantealabama.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Williams-et-al-Etowah-COVID-Complaint_redacted.pdf
Link to TRO: https://adelantealabama.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Williams-et-al-Etowah-COVID-TRO-Memo_redacted.pdf
For more information as well as today's filings, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights' case page.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCR is committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
(212) 614-6464LATEST NEWS
Faith Groups Sue Over Trump's Christian Nationalist 'Religious Liberty Commission'
"The Religious Liberty Commission isn't about protecting religious liberty for all; it's about rejecting our nation's religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative 'Judeo-Christian' beliefs," said one critic.
Feb 09, 2026
"Religious freedom for some is religious freedom for none."
That's what Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, said in a Monday statement as faith groups filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York over President Donald Trump's so-called Religious Liberty Commission.
Since Trump launched the commission last year, critics have warned that its true intent is to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. Brandeis Raushenbush, his alliance, Hindus for Human Rights, Muslims for Progressive Values, and the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund renewed that argument in the complaint, which names Trump, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, the commission, and its leader, Mary Margaret Bush, as defendants.
"The government has no right to pick and choose which religious beliefs to promote, and which to marginalize," said Brandeis Raushenbush. "The Trump administration has failed to uphold our country's proud religious freedom tradition, and we will hold them accountable. Today's lawsuit is our recommitment to fight for religious liberty for all with every tool available to us."
The complaint argues that "the composition and operations of the commission violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)," which Congress enacted in 1972 "to curb the executive branch's reliance on superfluous, secretive, and biased 'advisory committees.'" Under the law, "every advisory committee must meet public transparency requirements, be in the public interest, be fairly balanced among competing points of view, and be structured to avoid inappropriate influence by special interests."
"While this body is ostensibly designed to defend 'religious liberty for all Americans' and celebrate 'religious pluralism' it actually represents only a single 'Judeo-Christian' viewpoint," the complaint states. "It held its first three meetings at the Museum of the Bible and has closed its meetings with a Christian prayer 'in Jesus' name.'"
"Only one of its members is not Christian, and the Christian members do not represent the full diversity of the Christian faith," the filing continues. "The commission's meetings have repeatedly referenced the belief that the United States was founded as a 'Judeo-Christian nation' and the membership reflects that viewpoint. All members of the commission advocate for increased religiosity, and specifically their brand of 'Judeo-Christian' religiosity, in public life."
"The commission's members have promoted the primacy of a Judeo-Christian worldview in the public sphere, advocated for discrimination against minority groups under the guise of 'religious liberty,' and otherwise supported policies that threaten religious freedom for all those who do not conform to their particular worldview," the document details.
Ria Chakrabarty, senior policy director of Hindus for Human Rights, said Monday that "by stacking this Religious Liberty Commission with a narrow set of voices and hiding the commission's work from the public eye, the Trump administration is evading the transparency and balance that federal law requires."
"Hindus for Human Rights is proud to stand with our multifaith partners to defend a pluralistic democracy where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and nonreligious people all belong as equals," she added.
A commission that claims “religious liberty” while excluding Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs—and nonreligious Americans—isn’t protecting freedom. It’s narrowing it.We’re challenging this commission in court. democracyforward.org/news/press-r...
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— Hindus For Human Rights (@hfhr.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:21 AM
Ani Zonneveld, president and founder of Muslims for Progressive Values, noted that "as a Muslim American organization, we have seen firsthand how elevating a singular religion above others, especially in a country as religiously diverse as the United States, leads to the oppression and possible persecution of minority faiths."
The plaintiffs are represented by Democracy Forward, which has filed over 150 lawsuits against the Trump administration since the president returned to power last year, and the decades-old Americans United for Separation of Church and State—whose president and CEO, Rachel Laser, stressed that "the Religious Liberty Commission isn't about protecting religious liberty for all; it's about rejecting our nation's religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative 'Judeo-Christian' beliefs."
Blasting the commission's public meetings as "a vivid example of this favoritism," Laser added that its "true purpose and operations can't be squared with America's constitutional promise of church-state separation."
Specifically, Laser's group and other advocates of church-state separation have long pointed to the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars government from making any "law respecting an establishment of religion."
"Since the nation's founding, the values of religious liberty and pluralism have been central to the American identity. These values are now under accelerated attack," declared Perryman, who's also on the Interfaith Alliance board. "The fatally flawed way this commission was assembled makes clear that the outcome isn't just un-American, it's against the law."
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53 Migrants Dead or Missing After Boat Capsizes Off Coast of Libya: UN Agency
The UN’s International Organization for Migration warned that it “does not consider Libya to be a safe port for migrants.”
Feb 09, 2026
A United Nations agency said on Monday that 53 migrants are dead or missing after their boat capsized off the coast of Libya.
According to the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), the boat carrying the migrants capsized in "perishingly cold waters of the central Mediterranean Sea, north of the coastal town of Zuwara" on Friday.
At least two women, originally from Nigeria, survived the shipwreck and were rescued by Libyan authorities.
However, the rescued women offered little hope for finding other survivors, as one said her husband drowned, while the other said she lost both of her children who were aboard the vessel.
IOM noted that at least 375 migrants were reported dead or missing while journeying in the central Mediterranean Sea last month alone, and the agency said there are likely "many more tragedies" that have gone unrecorded.
In 2025, IOM reported 1,342 migrants dead or missing while traveling through the central Mediterranean.
IOM also warned migrants about trying to reach their destinations by traveling through Libya.
"IOM does not consider Libya to be a safe port for migrants," the agency said. "Investigations indicate that the victims had been held in captivity and subjected to torture to coerce ransom payments from their families."
The agency pointed to a recent raid of an underground facility in the region of Kufra, where authorities freed more than 200 migrants who had been detained by traffickers.
"Initial information suggests that the migrants had been held for a prolonged period in grossly inhumane conditions," IOM said of the facility.
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Meet the $165 Billion 'Annoyance Economy' That Drives You Nuts—and Sucks Us Dry—All Year Long
"While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up."
Feb 09, 2026
Corporate profits in the US have surged in recent decades, with subscription-based businesses reporting some of the biggest revenue growth as more Americans use streaming services and sign up for "subscribe and save" models in a quest for ease and convenience.
While promising consumers that subscribing to a service will save them money and time, subscription-based businesses have made canceling the services increasingly difficult, contributing to Americans spending 60% longer on the phone with customer service lines than they did two decades ago.
And although corporations hardly need the extra money, making cancellations more arduous for customers can boost their revenue by anywhere from 14% to over 200%, according to the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, which released a report Monday on what it calls "the annoyance economy."
The labyrinthine processes that millions of Americans face each year when they try to cancel subscription services is just one part of the annoyance economy, according to Groundwork, which detailed the seemingly endless time, money, and patience people spend "just trying to get basic things done"—as well as efforts by corporations and the Trump administration to make sure it stays that way.
While millions are struggling with the rising costs of groceries, healthcare, housing, childcare, and just about everything else, the report explains how—thanks to corporate greed and a White House intent on enabling it—Americans are also shelling out at least $165 billion per year in fees as well as lost time.
In addition to cancellation processes, the annoyance economy includes the $90 billion people across the US spend every year on junk fees when they buy concert tickets, make hotel reservations, and order food delivery; rental application fees that keep people from even attempting to move to new housing that could put them closer to work or school; and administrative healthcare tasks like obtaining coverage information and resolving questions about premiums and deductibles.
"While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up," wrote Groundwork policy fellow Chad Maisel and Stanford University economist Neale Mahoney, the authors of the report, who cited a 2019 survey that found 1 in 4 respondents delayed getting healthcare or avoided it altogether specifically because of the administrative tasks they had to complete in order to get an appointment and make sure it was covered.
"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork, according to a recent analysis."
Another new poll from Data for Progress found that nearly 80% of Americans reported "at least a little frustration" when coordinating their healthcare and filling out health insurance paperwork.
"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork," reads the report, citing another recent analysis. "Polling confirms this: More than 1 in 3 Americans report dealing with health insurance headaches more than 20 times per year."
With frustration over health insurance companies' practices increasingly common, reads the report, "policymakers are missing important opportunities to take on a handful of egregious and particularly annoying practices."
Lawmakers could require insurance companies to make it easy for patients to fill out and submit claims online—instead of downloading, printing, and physically mailing claim forms with itemized receipts as Cigna requires patients to do.
Congress could also create a "healthcare sludge unit" to monitor and root out "needless friction throughout the healthcare experience."
Such a project could leverage tools "like 'blind shopper' experiments, public feedback lines, and direct engagement with industry to surface and fix barriers that waste patients’ time and erode trust."
The report also takes on the spam texts and calls that have become all-to-familiar to anyone with a cellphone.
"Text messaging, once reserved for conversation with friends and family, now resembles our email spam folders, dominated by unsolicited offers from companies, politicians, and fraudsters," wrote Maisel and Mahoney, who shared that on the day they wrote about spam in the report, "one of us received five spam calls, a text from 'Victoria' offering a $500-a-day job, and two breathless fundraising messages from political candidates we’ve never supported—or even heard of."
Those spam communications were some of the more than 130 million scam and illegal marketing calls Americans receive each day and the nearly 20 billion texts that were sent each month over the past year—leading "virtually all respondents" to Data for Progress' poll to report that the calls and texts are at least "a little frustrating" and 68% call them "very frustrating."
State and federal lawmakers could and should take action against spam calls and texts, said Maisel and Mahoney. Congress should modernize the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was passed in 1991—well before companies began inundating Americans' inboxes with the newest robocalling and texting software.
"If a platform automatically dials from a stored list of numbers, it’s now exempt from the TCPA’s rules," reads the report. "The result: far more robocall and spam text operations can legally target people without their consent. Congress should update the definition of autodialer to include any callers and texters who automatically contact stored numbers, unless there’s real human involvement in sending each message."
Former President Joe Biden's Federal Communications Commission tried to close the "lead generator loophole,” which allows third-party marketers to collect people's contact information and sell it to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of businesses, but companies sued over the FCC's action and won in court.
President Donald Trump could issue an executive order directing federal agencies "to leverage all available resources and authorities to end robocalls and spam texts once and for all," said Maisel and Mahoney.
But the authors noted that the Trump administration's mass layoffs across the government would make enforcement more difficult.
"The Department of Justice also needs to prioritize enforcement against bad actors," they wrote. "While the FCC can levy fines for violations, it cannot pursue their collection without the DOJ. Of the eight robocalling forfeiture orders referred by the FCC, the DOJ has pursued only two for collection."
In the case of the hoops consumers are made to jump through in order to cancel subscriptions and services, the report emphasizes that the federal government has made significant inroads before to help the public.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) intervened in 2023 and stopped Toyota Motor Credit from continuing its practice of routing all consumer calls through a hotline "where representatives were instructed to keep promoting products until a consumer asked to cancel three times, at which point they were told cancellation was only possible by submitting a written request."
Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was lauded by consumer advocates for its click-to-cancel rule in 2024, requiring sellers to “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up."
But Trump's FTC last year delayed implementation of the rule after industry groups said that "it would take a substantial amount of time to come into compliance.” A federal appeals court then effectively killed the rule altogether.
While the fees that gradually trickle out of Americans' bank accounts into the annoyance economy are often small individually, the report emphasizes that they add up—and the consequences of these business practices and the government's failure to stop them "extend beyond wasted time and money."
"When life is reduced to jumping through an endless series of hoops—just to fix a billing error, secure a refund, or cancel a subscription—it breeds cynicism and disengagement," reads the report. "If the government can remove even a few of those obstacles, we can show the American people that someone is paying attention and begin the long process of rebuilding public trust."
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