Two separate stories from the past week share the same pattern: ICE and its chief contractor GEO Group allegedly using solitary confinement (which is considered torture under international law) to punish detainees for speaking out about conditions in detention facilities.

At Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, GEO officials openly admit to punishing detainee Edin Daniel Chinchilla-Roque for attempting to start a hunger strike at the facility. GEO officials running the facility put him in solitary confinement “for inciting a group demonstration,” which Spotlight PA calls “a high offense in ICE’s detention handbook.” Chinchilla-Roque feels that being put in solitary was “a punishment for everything I've been saying, for the information I put out of the prison. Because this is a horrible situation. I won’t give up.”

According to a headline from The Sun, “3 detainees who recently spoke to congressional visitors at Adelanto ICE facility reportedly sent to solitary confinement.” At this facility, also run by GEO Group, detention center employees dressed in riot gear dragged away three prisoners, specifically targeting people who had talked to concerned members of Congress, locking the prisoners in solitary. Melissa Shepard of Immigrant Defenders Law Center was quoted by the Sun: “[T]hey were clearly targeted for their participation in talking with the congressional representatives… [Solitary confinement] is a punishment and used clearly as a deterrent for behaviors that [facility workers] don’t want to tolerate.”

An anonymous hunger striker quoted by the Sun remains defiant: “They try to put fear in us by threatening us with [solitary confinement], taking commissary away, etc. But we [are] all pulling strong and day by day we [are] getting more people on board to peacefully protest from inside the facility.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)