Immigrant Detainee Says He Was X-Rayed for Contraband

Yuri McKoy just wrapped up a visit with his newborn son, Joshua, when he went in for the mandatory strip search in one of the few places at the Essex County Correctional Facility that doesn't have a video camera. McKoy said he knew the drill. If you choose to have a "contact visit" — meaning you can touch, hold and hug the loved ones who visit — then afterward, you must get strip-searched. Corrections officers want to make sure that contraband isn't passed to a detainee via, say, a baby blanket.

McKoy said he was prepared to strip naked.

But the corrections officer thought "detainee McKoy's demeanor seemed to change" after Joshua and the baby's mother left the visiting area, according to one of two Essex County Department of Corrections reports filed after the incident and obtained through a public records request. McKoy seemed "very nervous" and "suspicious."

On the way into the strip-search room, McKoy "seemed to move with the intent to get in" the room ahead of the officer, who suspected McKoy of concealing contraband in his rectum. "When I asked him to begin the strip search by passing me his shirt, his hands quickly went into his waistband and immediately moved behind his buttocks," the officer wrote. Since McKoy refused to raise his hands, the officer "immediately took him down to the ground and handcuffed him."

McKoy was taken to the medical unit, where he underwent what the jail characterized as a strip search but what McKoy called a body cavity search. Either way, both sides agree, no contraband was found.

Still, that didn't satisfy the officers, and he was taken to University Hospital in Newark. That's where McKoy said he underwent an X-ray to determine, once and for all, if he had contraband inside of him. Essex County officials wouldn't go on the record with what happened, but medical records provided by his attorney say that McKoy was "sent to hospital for possible foreign body ingestion...nothing was found."  

When he returned to the jail, McKoy was charged with an infraction for refusing to be strip searched, and sent to what the guards call administrative detention — and which inmates call solitary confinement.

The extraordinary efforts to keep contraband out of the jail — and McKoy's subsequent punishment — provide a window into how Essex County, the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention subcontractor in the New York City region, manages its immigrant population. The county jail has an approximately $45 million contract with ICE to detain between 800 and 900 immigrants at any given time at its massive facility in Newark.

Many of the immigrants housed there lived in New Jersey before their arrests, although some were picked up crossing the southern border. And the vast majority, according to the county, have past criminal records. But they are not being held on criminal charges — they are detained as they await proceedings on civil immigration violations or until the government can make arrangements to deport them.

Rosa Santana, program director at First Friends of New York and New Jersey, which advocates for detained immigrants, told county officials at a meeting last month that the staff at the jail needs more training. "The staff is trained to work with inmates, they're not trained to work with ICE detainees," she said. "They don't know the difference of working with someone who has a past conviction of 25 years ago, and somebody who is a county inmate."

McKoy got caught up in the immigration system when he was brought to the United States from Jamaica when he was just 3 years old. He overstayed his visa and then committed and was convicted of several crimes, which his attorney said were mostly shoplifting and marijuana possession offenses. McKoy also had two disorderly persons offenses for theft and criminal mischief. The convictions, and his lack of legal immigration status, made McKoy a target for deportation.

McKoy's son was born last year. Without a Social Security number, McKoy said he had trouble finding work and shoplifted for money. Just before Christmas last year he was arrested at the Macy's in the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne for stealing baby clothes, which he said he planned to give to Joshua, and a sweater, which he planned to sell on the street.

"I didn't have any money and I was desperate," McKoy said in a phone interview from the jail. "With a kid on my shoulders, it just seemed justified."

McKoy spent several weeks at the Passaic County Jail before ICE picked him up and brought him to Essex. He had been at the jail for more than a month when the incident happened. He said he did not refuse a strip search.

"You take off everything, naked," he said. "They just look at you, tell you bend over and cough...I was about to get naked but [the officer] said the way I was moving, he said I was trying to stuff something up my rectum...So he punches me and throws me on the ground, and then puts his knees in my back, and he tells the rest of the [corrections officers] that I got something up my rectal area, and they strip-searched me, cavity-searched me and X-rayed me, and nothing was there. So I kind of proved them wrong about that."

The corrections officers union did not respond to a request for comment.

McKoy and his attorney, Rachel Salazar, said he was transported to University Hospital in Newark for the X-ray. The location is redacted in the incident report provided to WNYC, but medical records that Salazar provided said he was sent to "UH" for "possible foreign body ingestion," and nothing was found.

In the end, McKoy was charged with refusing to obey an officer and was placed in administrative detention, which is the jail's term for what is widely described as solitary confinement. He stayed in administrative detention for what he said was 10 days — 23 hours alone each day in a cell, without reading or writing material. "I just sat on the bed and looked at the ceiling," he said. 

County officials said that immigrant detainees in administrative detention get a full 90 minutes out of their cells every day. The detainees also have access to three books at a time, plus writing materials, along with visits and phone calls, officials said.

Dominic Sisti, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how medical personnel handle demands by law enforcement, reviewed McKoy's incident reports for WNYC. He said solitary confinement for someone who refused a search is unjustified. It should not be used like "high school detention," he said, because it "will literally cause people to become seriously mentally ill."

"This gentleman was seriously abused," Sisti said. "He deserved to be taken care of, he deserves to be treated humanely, and the exact opposite seems to be happening."

Sisti also objects to medical intervention — use of X-ray, and exposure to radiation — for detainees. "The idea that a person is acting quote-unquote suspiciously, and then is subjected to this type of humiliation, to me is patently and undeniably unethical," Sisti said. He noted that McKoy had just left his baby and his baby's mother when the incident occurred — "he was probably overwhelmed with complete and total grief."

The jail's contract with ICE is coming under increased scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general recently issued a scathing report describing deplorable conditions for immigrants at the jail, including food that smells like fecal matter, and ripped mattresses. The jail underwent a days-long lockdown in a search for contraband in February, and the warden recently resigned after being arrested for driving under the influence. In the side of the jail that detains non-immigrants, a suicide last year of an inmate who allegedly killed himself while wearing a straitjacket is under criminal investigation, and another suicide last month is still being examined by the county prosecutor's office. 

Activists are mobilizing against the county's contract with ICE, pressuring the Democratic county executive, Joseph "Joe D." DiVincenzo, along with the entirely Democratic legislative body, the county freeholders, to either scrap the contract or use some of the revenue to improve conditions.

Last month, DiVincenzo and the freeholders announced that $750,000 will be allocated to provide lawyers for some detained immigrants, supplementing a $2.1 million immigrant defense fund from the state. Unlike criminally charged individuals, detained immigrants don't have a constitutional right to legal representation, and their chances of deportation are much higher without counsel. The new money doesn't cover most immigrants, however, and activists want all detained immigrants to have attorneys, just like those arrested by ICE in New York and housed at the jails in Bergen and Hudson counties. 

A subcommittee of freeholders examining the ICE contract is also presenting a report about detention to the public Wednesday at 5 p.m. at the Hall of Records in Newark. At that meeting, Freeholder President Brendan Gill said he plans to announce that if he's still on the board when the ICE contract expires, he will not vote to reauthorize it. He also wants to create a civilian review board to oversee complaints. 

Last year in Hudson County, immigration activists successfully pushed for an end to that county’s ICE contract by 2020. But in Essex, scrapping the contract does not seem politically feasible. Even some activists who oppose ICE are wary of closing the facility, fearing that the detainees would be shipped somewhere else, far from their families and attorneys, and possibly in harsher conditions.

"If we just shut it they're not going to be released — they're going to be sent elsewhere, and I don't want that to happen to them," said Freeholder Pat Sebold, who otherwise opposes Trump's immigration policies.

Wayne Richardson, the freeholder board's vice president, said he doesn't want the detainees to be sent to a privately-run prison, where he said conditions would be far worse. He said that the newly allocated $750,000 to provide legal services is a good step forward. "While that's not a lot of money in the overall scheme of things, it's a start and we got to start somewhere," he said.

Sebold and Richardson said anti-ICE activists need to take up their complaints about immigration enforcement with Washington, not Essex.

But Kathy O'Leary, regional coordinator at Pax Christi, a Catholic peace and justice organization, told freeholders last month that she rejects that approach.

"It is not enough that you tell us to go to Washington, DC to end detention," she said. "You need to become a part of the solution to this problem...You are elected Democrats...You should be on this side to end these contracts. Whether we end them today humanely or end them tomorrow humanely, we need together to come up with a plan to end these contracts."