Baker County Sheriff’s Complex. (Source: Google Maps)
Central Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost took to his Instagram page Monday to call for closure of Baker Detention Center in North Florida because of what he described as inhumane conditions for immigration detainees.
The center, a county jail near Jacksonville, operates in part as a federal immigration detention facility.
Frost, a member of the House Oversight Committee, made a surprise visit to Baker last year.
“What I saw was horrible, and I saw conditions that no human should live in,” he said.
Frost added that the most common refrain from the detainees he spoke with when visiting the jail was that they either wanted to move to one of the other ICE facilities in the state or simply give up their legal fight to remain in the U.S. and return to their countries of origin, regardless of how unsafe the conditions are back home.
Although the Baker facility is not in his congressional district, Frost, who made history two years ago when he became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress (and won re-election earlier this month, getting 62% of the vote), said his job as member of the Oversight Committee is to oversee the federal government and make sure things are being done in the “correct manner.”
“This is not the correct manner,” he said. “This is not the correct manner for inmates. Detainees. For humans. No one should have to live like that, especially when they’re playing out a process that we have prescribed as a nation.”
Last week lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida (ACLU), representing a medical practitioner and a woman with second-hand knowledge of the conditions at Baker, filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Homeland Security and a whistleblower disclosure alleging human rights violation at the facility.
It’s not the first time that allegations of wrongdoing at Baker have been alleged.
In September 2022, a coalition of civil rights groups including the ACLU filed a 22-page complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, raising 130 detainee allegations. They included charges that that guards beat one detainee severely enough to damage his ear, pepper sprayed someone while kneeling on the person’s body, sent someone into a diabetic coma from medical neglect, denied women sanitary products, and more.
It also alleged that guards denied water to detainees who attempted to protest conditions through a hunger strike.
DHS recommendations
In response, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) which had already conducted several in-person investigations of the Baker County’s Sheriff’s Office in response to complaints, produced a series of recommendations to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to address problems documented at Baker. They included:
- Ensure that Baker provide mandatory discrimination, retaliation, and harassment training for all staff.
- Ensure Baker is providing adequate language access services, including language translation in all interactions with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) detainees.
- Ensure Baker is providing adequate legal resources and access for all detainees and is ensuring detainees’ legal privacy.
Joining Frost on the Instagram Live feed was Amy Godshall, an immigrants’ rights attorney at the ACLU of Florida, and Meredith Al-Rekabi, whose husband was detained at Baker for 16 months. She said his life was in jeopardy there because at times he was not allowed to access medication.
“He was constantly threatened with solitary confinement. And so were all of the men who were housed in the area where he was,” Al-Bebaki recounted. “The feeling that there was no oversight. No one knew what was happening. There was a real fear of retaliation for my husband.”
The ACLU of Florida has heard hundreds of complaints from Baker detainees or their loved ones since they created a hotline for such complaints several years ago, Godshall said.
“I have been on several hotline calls, talking to people,” Godshall said. “You can just hear the desperation in their voices about what they’re experiencing. It’s beyond inhumane. They’re treated like animals, or worse in some situations. Even though immigration detention is supposed to be civil detention, it’s not supposed to be punitive. They’re not there to serve a committal sentence.”
Mass deportation
Frost said it was important to highlight the situation at Baker because of President-elect Donald Trump’s promise of a “mass deportation” that would round up immigrants around the country who have violated the law — a message Trump doubled down on Monday.
“We’re about to go into an administration that has promised the largest deportation force in the history of our nation,” Frost said, adding that some of those who could be detained will be facilities like Baker.
“And here’s the thing — if we think it’s bad now, with the amount of members of people that Trump wants to deport, we’re talking about them working at creating mass camps overnight or over the course of just a few months to throw people in. And so, what Baker provides us is obviously a massive call for action now, because there’s people in there, but also shows us what will happen at scale if we don’t advocate and make sure people know about it.”
The Phoenix reached out to the Baker County Sheriff’s Office for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.