At the beginning of January, Juan Jose Erazo Herrera found himself coughing up blood and having difficulty breathing. The 20-year-old asylum seeker, held by immigration authorities at a jail north of Sacramento, tested positive for COVID-19 on Jan. 7, a few days after his symptoms began.
The diagnosis felt particularly stinging to Erazo Herrera. He had repeatedly called on officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Yuba County Jail to do more to prevent a coronavirus outbreak at the facility, including waging hunger strikes last year to protest what he believed were unsafe conditions.
“They didn’t listen to us,” Erazo Herrera said in Spanish. “And it’s really unfair. It’s not our fault we get sick when we can’t protect ourselves.”
The coronavirus has spread rapidly at the Yuba County Jail, infecting about half of all the people currently locked up there. More than 120 county inmates and nine ICE detainees at the facility have tested positive for COVID-19 since last month.
Guards isolated Erazo Herrera in a small, concrete cell with no windows for 12 days, he said. When he was first placed there, he said the conditions were squalid, with a filthy toilet, moldy walls and a bed covered in dust and other people’s hair.
“I’m not going to lie, when I first saw the cell, I started crying,” said Erazo Herrera, who is originally from El Salvador. “I tried to protest. It made me so sad to see how dirty it was.”