A language barrier between a Spanish-speaking detainee and an English-speaking officer turned a request for the bathroom into a month of solitary confinement at the Baker County Detention Center.
The Macclenny facility, 60 miles north of Gainesville, is one of four U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in the state.
Advocacy groups have repeatedly criticized the facility for medical mistreatment, unsanitary conditions and other violations of National Detention Standards.
New complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and a former Baker County Detention Center medical provider, whose name is being withheld to protect their identity, show language barriers make these problems worse.
An ACLU complaint tells the story of a 33-year-old woman who was verbally abused while trying to communicate. A whistleblower’s testimony shows she’s not the only one.
A bathroom request
A Spanish-speaking woman an ACLU document referred to as Ana (a pseudonym) arrived at the Baker County Detention Center in May 2023.
Later that month, as an officer escorted her outside for recreation, Ana asked for the bathroom in English, explaining in Spanish that she needed feminine hygiene products. The officer told Ana in English she couldn’t return to her cell and listed other restroom locations.
Ana didn’t respond. Frustrated, the officer began to yell, drawing more staff to the scene.
According to the ACLU’s complaint, none of the officers who arrived spoke to Ana in Spanish or attempted to use a translation service. Instead, they handcuffed her and escorted her to an isolation cell for disobeying verbal orders, disruptive conduct and interfering with a staff member.
In the isolation cell, Ana again asked for feminine hygiene products.
She didn’t receive them and bled through her clothing.
An officer told Ana in English she’d be in the cell for two days, holding up two fingers. Ana, who had previously experienced human trafficking, began to have a panic attack. She pounded on the door and broke the room’s sprinkler in an effort to get medical attention.
Staff escorted Ana to a new cell and, after a disciplinary proceeding, sentenced her to 30 more days in solitary confinement. An interpreter translated the hearing’s proceedings into Spanish, but staff provided documentation of the sentence to Ana only in English.
Ana’s mental and physical health dramatically declined over the next month.
She vomited from eating allegedly spoiled meals, experienced skin reactions from unhygienic clothing and at one point was restrained with her breast exposed, rarely receiving information in Spanish, according to the ACLU complaint.
According to Amy Godshall, an immigrants’ rights attorney with the ACLU of Florida, each English-only interaction was a violation of ICE’s National Detention Standards. That policy “requires the detention facilities, such as Baker, to use language services for people who aren’t native English speakers,” she said.
Asked why it didn’t happen, Godshall responded: “Good question. It should have.”
Beyond Ana
Godshall described a culture of dismissal at the facility, with staff “not actually caring to understand” detainees. The whistleblower, one of the site’s former medical providers, agreed.
Despite ICE having 24/7 access to phone interpretation services, facility staff “often refused” to use the resource, according to the whistleblower’s disclosure.
“Instead of using the available interpretation services, [the whistleblower] saw officers kicking cell doors, yelling at individuals to speak English,” the report said.
When the whistleblower spoke to patients with limited English skills, they used an interpretation service that translated and recorded the conversation. They put the recording’s number in the patient’s chart, but was told to stop, “because it could be used by lawyers against Baker in court.”
The ACLU learned of Ana’s story from the whistleblower, allowing attorneys to connect with her directly, something Godshall noted was rare.
“It’s easier for people to advocate for themselves in ICE detention if they speak English, so people who don’t are already at a disadvantage, she said. Even if they do manage to connect with an attorney, fear of retaliation can keep people from sharing their experiences.
“This is just one story of a much larger problem,” Godshall said. “It’s a horrific story and this is happening all the time.”
Progress on paper, stalling in practice
In Florida, nearly 30% of people speak a language other than English at home.
While the Baker County facility doesn’t release detainee language data, Syracuse University data showed the top five nationalities leaving the facility were Cuban, Mexican, Jamaican, Haitian and Honduran, suggesting a high prevalence of foreign languages.
ICE is required by law to provide “meaningful access” to people with limited English proficiencies, as is any entity receiving federal funds. According to its website, the agency uses “professional oral interpretation and translation services that cover more than 200 languages, including Indigenous languages.”
Its detention handbook is translated into 18 languages other than English.
Yet, when staff from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (OIG) visited the Baker facility in January 2024, none of the detainees they interviewed had received the handbook in a language they could understand.
The OIG marked the issue as resolved a few months later when the facility provided pictures of digital English and Spanish-language handbooks.
A national problem
Lapses in language access extend beyond the Baker County Detention Center’s walls. A 2023 Report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) found ICE repeatedly failed to comply with its own language access policy.
“Over the past five years, CRCL has received 208 allegations related to language access, opened 116 complaint investigations, and issued approximately 118 recommendations to ICE regarding language access issues in its detention facilities,” the report read.
In response to this complaint and others, the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, created an Indigenous language plan in February 2024.
The plan aimed to meet the language needs of a growing number of speakers of K’iche, Quechua, Mam, Mixteco and other Indigenous Central American languages. The plan outlines eight goals for improving language access from 2024-2025, including recording messages in Indigenous languages and forging connections with Indigenous migrant community leaders.
“I think, first of all, it’s a good step in the right direction that ICE is trying to address this issue,” Godshall said. “But I think ICE also needs to hold its facilities more accountable to actually following their policies. We see at Baker, for example, there are a lot of ICE policies that Baker just doesn’t follow.”
The Baker County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to WUFT’s request for comment.
ICE public affairs officer Mike Mears wrote to WUFT that the agency does not comment on litigation proceedings or outcomes but that it “is committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in a safe, secure, and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement.”
“All allegations of abuse or other misconduct are taken seriously and are investigated,” Mears wrote in a statement. “If any such allegations are substantiated, appropriate action is taken.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
