Our reporter Ben Berke spoke with Morning Edition Host Luis Hernandez about what happened inside the former ICE detention center on May 1, 2020, what we can learn from the newly released videos, and what we still don’t know.
Luis Hernandez: What actually happened that day?
Ben Berke: A group of about 25 immigrants facing deportation staged a protest inside the Bristol County jail, which back then had a contract with the Trump administration to house these immigrants on behalf of ICE. These detainees wound up barricading the door to their group dormitory. A lot of property was damaged, but after about an hour, the detainees involved had mostly settled down. The sheriff at the time, Tom Hodgson, decided to send a tactical unit into the room, with gas masks and OC spray and muzzled dogs. They opened the door and immediately tossed a flash bang grenade inside. The detainees were all in restraints within about a minute, but the amount of OC spray and pepper ball they were exposed to led to two people collapsing from respiratory issues. Both were hospitalized. A third detainee was hospitalized with a shoulder injury.
Hernandez: What set off this confrontation in the ICE detention center?
Berke: This was May 2020, about two months into the coronavirus pandemic. These detainees were sleeping in bunk beds in a mass dormitory, and they knew a lot less about the virus than we know now. Nurses at the jail had started getting sick with Covid and none of the ICE detainees had been tested yet. There was already a lot of hostility in the unit over whether the sheriff was doing enough to protect them. And as these tensions were escalating, the staff tried to get the detainees to leave their dormitory to take Covid tests. Some of the immigrants told me they were afraid of what would happen if they left the room and got split up. And it’s important to remember that a lot of these people don’t speak English and they didn’t know much about how American healthcare or American jails work. So the sheriff, witnessing this standoff, came in and personally tried to convince these detainees to take the tests. One of them walked over to a phone booth to call their lawyer and get their advice on what the right thing to do would be. What happened next is sort of unclear: the sheriff and this man got into a physical confrontation, and they disagree about who hit who. Regardless, a brawl basically broke out where some detainees threw plastic chairs at the guards, who pepper sprayed them in return before leaving the room. An hour later, that tactical unit I described fought its way into the dorm and subdued the place with a lot of force.
Hernandez: What were the consequences?
Berke: The Massachusetts Attorney General opened an investigation and found that the jail’s staff used excessive force and failed to provide appropriate medical care. The most striking example of this, I think, is a man who appeared to suffer cardiac arrest who was not taken to a hospital and was instead administered chest compressions and then placed into solitary confinement. About a year after this confrontation, Biden’s new secretary of Homeland Security took a look at the investigation and decided to shut down Hodgson’s ICE detention center. A few months later, Hodgson lost his first election in 25 years. So Hodgson claims the whole investigation was a political hatchet job. He says the report belongs ‘halfway down the sewer pipe.’ But on the flipside, it is also interesting that the Attorney General never prosecuted anyone for the civil rights violations that she identified. I asked the AG’s office to explain this decision this week and they did not respond.
Hernandez: This incident happened three years ago, at the dawn of the pandemic as you mentioned. Why is the video footage just being released now?
Berke: What really led to the video’s release was a public records request from a civilian. The AG’s office had been refusing to release the footage, and they were claiming they had privacy concerns about showing the faces of detainees and guards, but there was a civilian who appealed that decision and they won. And so the AG’s office was ordered to release the video. But they also took it upon themselves to scrub every face out of the video, making it impossible to tell who really did what. Even the faces of some of the dogs are blurred out. And the AG’s office also withheld a lot of the most important footage from the security cameras in the facility.
Hernandez: So if they’re blurring out the faces even of dogs, what can you actually see in the video?
Berke: You can see that the detainees didn’t seem to be resisting arrest when the tactical unit fought their way into the facility. But really what’s more striking about the videos is what they don’t reveal. The AG’s office didn’t release any footage whatsoever of the confrontation that led to this uprising and violence. Even though there’s 5.5 hours of footage from cellphones and camcorders, there’s still so many questions about what really happened. Many of the most brutal encounters that detainees described in the aftermath of this weren’t captured in any of the videos that were released.
Hernandez: Sheriff Hodgson says the incident was blown out of proportion by Democrats who wanted him out of office. Hodgson, who is a Republican, lost his election a few months after the Biden administration closed Bristol County’s ICE detention center. What does the new Democratic sheriff who replaced Hodgson think about the videos?
Berke: Last week, when I talked to the new Sheriff, Paul Heroux, he was walking this political tightrope where he agreed with the Attorney General’s findings that the jail’s staff used excessive force and failed to provide adequate medical care. But at the same time, Heroux was saying that Hodgson’s staff, who now work for him, followed their training to a T. I’ll play a clip where Heroux is trying to fit these two contradictory positions together.
Heroux: The CO’s — they did the job they were supposed to do. The way they went in, that was all the way it was supposed to happen. You know, for the most part. There might have been some things where excessive force happened, maybe.
Berke: When I pressed Heroux on this, he found a way to pin the blame on his predecessor, Tom Hodgson, and not the staff members that he’s now managing. Even though Heroux acknowledges excessive force might have occurred, he hasn’t fired or investigated anyone involved since he took office or reviewed these videos. Heroux kept saying that the biggest mistake that day was Hodgson’s insistence that the detainees leave their dormitory to be tested for Covid. Heroux says he probably would have just sent nurses into their unit instead, and that this whole conflict could potentially have been avoided with calmer leadership.
