by Chuck Sharman

Back in January 2020, Carlos Escobar Mejia, 57, was in a car in San Diego when he was pulled over by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. Though he had lived and worked in the U.S. since 1980, he was not a citizen and had no work authorization. CBP arrested him for the immigration violations. At an April 2020 hearing before an immigration judge, Mejia was deemed a flight risk and turned over to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Its agents put him in the Otay Mesa detention center, a 1,400-bed lockup operated under contract by for-profit private prison giant CoreCivic.

By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was underway, and several employees and migrant detainees at the lockup had already tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. Prison officials dragged their feet in providing masks to detainees, forcing them to sign liability waivers to get one, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, June 2020, p.32.] The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued on their behalf, and within weeks, Mejia was named on a list of medically vulnerable detainees that a federal judge had ordered ICE to compile. But it was too late; he was already hospitalized with COVID-19. His death on May 6, 2020, became the lockup’s first that was attributed to the disease.

With the aid of attorneys Eugene G. Iredale, Julia Yoo, and Grace Jun of Iredale & Yoo, APC in San Diego, Mejia’s estate filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California against the federal government and CoreCivic. Proceeding under the Federal Tort Claims Act, they noted that Mejia was one of just 531 detainees at the prison, which had capacity for at least 1,200; yet rather than letting detainees spread out to practice social distancing, officials shuttered part of the facility and crammed the detainees into the rest, attempting to segregate those not infected from those who were, waiting then to see what happened to them.

CoreCivic moved to dismiss the complaint, and the district court partially granted that request on August 5, 2022; however, dismissal of Plaintiff’s negligent supervision claim was denied. See: Est. of Mejia v. United States, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 141008 (S.D. Cal.). Over a year later, CoreCivic reached a settlement agreement, paying the Estate $82,500 and effectively ending the suit on April 19, 2024. See: Est. of Mejia v. United States, USDC (S.D. Cal.), Case No. 3:20-cv-02454.

Sadly, another outbreak of COVID-19 at Otay Mesa in August 2025 was causing detainees to miss court hearings in their immigration cases, according to attorney Michael Garcia, who heads up San ­Diego County’s Immigrant Legal Defense Program. He said that ICE and its parent agency, the federal Department of Homeland Security, were transferring his clients to other lockups without notifying the attorneys involved.

“We have one case, specifically, in that scenario the client didn’t show up in court and we were never notified,” he said. “Turns out that we find him in a facility in El Salvador.”  

Additional sources: Border Report, NPR News

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