Lawyers for detainees at the Otay Mesa Detention Center have long complained that their clients often receive substandard care. Now, a former insider at the facility is making similar claims.
A wrongful termination lawsuit filed in February by Jurumay Oliva claims chronic understaffing of nurses at the facility prevents migrants from getting adequate medical care.
Oliva was a nurse supervisor employed by CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based company that operates the facility. Her primary responsibilities were to supervise nursing staff and ensure the facility met standards, according to her lawyer Lorrie Walker.
“She acted as the bridge between the nursing staff and management,” Walker said. “Throughout that position, she was privy to complaints being made by the nursing staff.”
In the complaint, Oliva claims only two nurses were often available to serve a population of 1,500 detainees. “In short, Oliva stressed that because care was not timely provided, detainees were suffering,” the complaint states.
When Oliva brought her concerns about chronic understaffing to management, she was retaliated against and ultimately terminated, according to the complaint.
The complaint gives examples of poor medical care at the private detention center. In one case, a detainee developed cellulitis from an open wound that got infected after it was not properly treated. Another detainee “experienced multiple organ failure and needed a liver transplant,” as a result of improper medical monitoring, the complaint said.
“This short-staffing not only causes the nurses to be incredibly overworked,” but also negatively impacted patient care,” Walker said.
KPBS wants to hear from you
Are you a current or former medical professional working at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. Please contact reporter Gustavo Solis at gasolis@kpbs.org.
CoreCivic denied all allegations and raised various defenses in legal filings responding to Oliva’s lawsuit.
“While generally it is our policy to not comment on matters involving litigation, I can share with you that at our Otay Mesa Detention Center our dedicated medical staff work hard to provide immigration detainees comprehensive medical and mental health care,” spokesperson Ryan Gustin wrote in an email statement.
The Otay Mesa Detention Center regularly passes annual inspections by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency that oversees detention centers.
“Overall, the detainees were very content with their current conditions,” according to the 2022 facility inspection report on Otay Mesa published by ICE.
CoreCivic is accredited by the American Correctional Association (ACA) and the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare. All of their medical staff are licensed and credentialed professionals who meet the highest standard of care, according to Gustin.
According to the ACA, accreditation is earned through a series of reviews, evaluations and audits. ACA standards, “reflect practical, up-to-date policies and procedures that safeguard the life, health and safety of staff and offenders.”
Gustin pointed out that ICE maintains full-time staff on site who monitor conditions and have, “unfettered access to detainees, CoreCivic staff, and all areas of our facility.”
“We take seriously our obligation to adhere to federal Performance Based National Detention Standards in our ICE-contracted facilities, including OMDC,” the statement said.
Gustin noted that ICE maintains full-time staff on site who monitor conditions at the private detention center. The facility has regularly passed ICE inspections.
ICE did not respond to questions about the lawsuit or the quality of medical care at Otay Mesa.
Immigration lawyers react
Although the company claims to provide adequate care, immigration lawyers KPBS spoke to said Oliva’s complaint validates stories from detainees they’ve heard for years.
“It’s things that advocates and lawyers have raised before, and I think this is a good showing that it’s not something that’s being made up,” said Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
Priscilla Merida said some of her clients have complained about poor medical treatment in the facility since she began representing detainees in 2019.
“There’s been multiple instances where someone has asked for a medical service and they are not seen until days later. And, when they are seen, it’s just a very simple overview instead of actually getting to the root of the problem.”Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, Immigrant Defenders Law Center
Merida, who is a staff attorney at the immigrant rights organization Al Otro Lado, said clients with chronic health conditions like HIV or hypertension complain about not getting their medications on time.
“When they are requesting to see a doctor, they put their requests early in the morning hoping to be seen that day, but they are not called until two weeks later,” she said.
Those criticisms match what Reyes-Perrariz said she has heard from clients.
“There’s been multiple instances where someone has asked for a medical service and they are not seen until days later,” she said. “And, when they are seen, it’s just a very simple overview instead of actually getting to the root of the problem.”
A history of complaints
The CoreCivic and other private detention centers have also faced scrutiny from the U.S. Congress.
In 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform investigated allegations of medical neglect in private detention centers. Their investigation “found that immigrants in detention centers operated by for-profit contractors are facing negative health outcomes and even death as a result of inadequate medical care, poor conditions, understaffing and delayed emergency care.”
That investigation includes one case from the Otay Mesa Detention Center in which multiple detainees reported that a woman showed signs of a stroke but “staff failed to take the issue seriously or call 911 in a timely manner.”
The woman survived but was partially paralyzed, according to the detainees’ accounts. .
Last year, several immigrant rights organizations in Nevada submitted a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security against CoreCivic alleging retaliatory transfers and medical neglect.
The complaint alleges that CoreCivic retaliated against five detainees from the Otay Mesa Detention Center by transferring them to other facilities in rural Nevada after they complained of poor medical treatment in Otay Mesa.
Consequences of understaffing
Keeping safe nurse-to-patient ratios is particularly important, said Catherine de Leon, a program coordinator for the Masters Entry Program of Nursing and the University of San Diego.
Nurses have a long list of responsibilities such as administering medications, monitoring vital signs, changing dress wounds and comforting patients at their bedside. Increasing the patient load creates a challenging work environment, de Leon said.
“It’s difficult to spread yourself thin and still provide adequate care,” she said.
De Leon wrote her dissertation on the health impact of simply having a nurse present.
“Sometimes, for a patient, that’s all they have,” she said. “Their family or friends may not be at the bedside available at the moment. When a person is healing, sometimes you only need that support.”
Missing inspection reports
The claims in the complaint are alleged to have happened after Olivia was hired in July 2022. The last time ICE published a facility inspection report for Otay Mesa was in January 2022.
In fact, ICE has not published an inspection report on its website for any detention facility since September 2022. This lack of transparency is troubling, Merida said.
“We haven’t seen some of the reports in years,” she said. “So, it really makes us concerned. Why are they not being transparent? Why do we keep hearing from our clients that they’re not being seen when they request medical appointments?”
In late February, KPBS requested copies of the 2023 and 2024 inspection reports. The agency has not produced those reports nor confirmed whether those inspections took place.
ICE did not respond to questions about allegations of medical neglect at Otay Mesa raised in Oliva’s lawsuit.
