President Biden – we call on you to close Winn NOW. We urgently demand that you immediately terminate all of ICE’s contracts at Winn Correctional Center, including with LaSalle Corrections; release everyone detained at the facility, and not transfer them to other detention centers; and stop using Winn to jail any population of people again.

Over Winn’s short history of serving as an ICE detention facility, people detained there, advocates, lawyers, government agencies, and journalists have witnessed, investigated, and detailed countless human rights violations. One of the major issues consistently named is a troubling pattern of medical neglect. People detained are not able to receive critical medical care, including insulin for diabetes, inhalers for asthma and hormone therapy for transgender migrants. There are documented stories of people detained removing their own cysts, because the most the medical staff would provide was ibuprofen and water. Winn has also consistently deprived people detained of basic human needs, including clean drinking water and edible food. People previously detained have reported “yellow drinking water” and cold, expired, raw and rotten food. Tragically, multiple people have died while in ICE custody at Winn, including a 33 year old Senegalese man as recently as February 2024.

Further, many people detained at Winn have reported violent physical and psychological abuse by officers, including as retaliation for protesting lack of information about their immigration cases. Officers have used pepper and tear gas on immigrants protesting, causing them to vomit blood and experience asthma attacks, and often punish people with solitary confinement for speaking out about conditions at the facility. Racist, homophobic, and transphobic harassment and abuse are common as well, including frequent reports of guards violently and physically forcing Black migrants to sign their deportation orders and using racist and hateful slurs. Multiple Black migrants have submitted complaints documenting serious injury from such assault by Winn staff. Last month, advocates submitted a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties regarding an unprovoked violent assault by three ICE officers of an individual detained at Winn, forcibly obtaining his signature and fingerprint on a document not provided to him in his native language

These reports from advocates and people detained at Winn have been confirmed again and again by both the government’s own oversight and inspection bodies and media investigations. In August 2021, in response to numerous extensive complaints from advocates about Winn, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties conducted an investigation and issued a scathing report calling out a “culture and conditions that can lead to abuse.” It advocated that ICE immediately stop transfers and new bookings into Winn, and that ICE stop detaining people at Winn altogether until conditions were improved. Instead, ICE actually detained more people at Winn after this report.

While your administration announced in early 2022 that they would seriously reduce the population at the facility, Winn remains open at full capacity today. ICE continues to transfer people there, while the reasons for its closure remain the same: Winn Correctional Center is still a “horrific” and unimproved pit of violence, rights violations, deprivation, and abuse.* Instead of changing directions from the Trump Administration’s insistent focus on incarcerating and punishing more immigrants, your administration has only continued along the same track. This must change.

This moment, as many others, exposes the arbitrary and inhumane nature of the U.S. detention system and underscores the need to shut down Winn and release people from immigration detention. We know that no one, regardless of their immigration status, is safe at Winn. People must be freed from immigration detention, jails, and prisons, and Winn must be shut down NOW!