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If you are interested in being a volunteer for the rally’s safety team on April 12th, reach out to me on Signal at bjmendelson.32 and I’ll put you in touch with the appropriate people.
You can You can RSVP here for the April 12th event.
And just a reminder for those living in Southern Orange County (Chester, Warwick, Tuxedo, Sloatsburg, Monroe, Woodbury, Blooming Grove, and Palm Tree) that Hands Off Hudson Valley will be having another stand-up event this Saturday, April 11th, at 1pm at the corner of 17M and Lake Street. All are welcome.
Special note for Village and Town of Monroe residents: We are looking for Monroe residents who want to join us in organizing a resistance to the South Blooming Grove led takeover of our Village, as well as advocating for the Town of Monroe to pass the resolution announcing its support for New York For All.
(The following podcast transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)
BJ Mendelson, reporter, The Monroe Gazette: Well, hello everyone. Thank you for joining this free edition of The Monroe Gazette podcast. Usually these are reserved for subscribers only.
I wanted to let you know that over in Goshen on Sunday, April 12th at 1 p.m. is going to be another Melt ICE event in Orange County. A lot of us have, I think we’ve all done the victory lap at this point of preventing DHS and ICE, for now, from setting up over in the Village of Chester. But as I keep trying to remind people that fight isn’t over.
In an official statement provided by the Department of Homeland Security to the Monroe Gazette, they said at this time, being the keywords, they have no new concentration camps — They didn’t use those words. I’m using those words — to announce. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve necessarily abandoned the village of Chester. So a lot of us all did a victory lap, and now I think it’s time to sort of refocus. And I’m not the only one, because the local DSA chapter and a number of great organizations throughout our part of New York are organizing a rally.
It’s called Melt ICE in Orange County. And again, it’s Sunday, April 12th at 1pm at the Village Green. South Church Street and Main Street in Goshen. So I hope to see you all there.
Noel, would you like to take a moment just to introduce yourself?
Noelle Peñas, New York Lawyers for The Public Interest: Hi, I’m Noelle. I’m the health justice community organizer with NLP New York Lourdes for the Public Interest and for years since about 2017 we’ve working to advocate for improved medical care in detention centers in New York State and then after repeated efforts to advocate for reform we realized ultimately there will never be adequate care in these detention centers and are not advocating for the closure of these jails so that folks can receive care in their communities.
BJ: Now, when you say adequate care can you just explain a little bit about what that means when it comes to the people in the facility? What are they expected to get versus what are they not getting?
Noelle: They should be getting the care that they would be receiving otherwise if they weren’t detained. ICE has also provided its own national detention standards for medical care. And so this is another standard of care that should be adhered to. But in practice, people are experiencing critical gaps of care. This includes lack of follow-up care for conditions that they experienced prior to entering detention. [Such as a] lack of proper medication, sometimes not receiving medication at all, lack of nutrition or language access, and also incorrect treatment. And we can go deeper into this as well. But overall, when people are requesting care, ICE has showed repeatedly that they are not adhering to the own standards that they provide.
BJ: Yeah, and you know, there’s just published reports now about the number of people that have been killed while in detention at facilities across the country that are operated by DHS and ICE.
And so we’ve definitely been paying attention of issues at Orange County Jail in Goshen and some of the issues surrounding ICE. So just so people who are listening this understand, there is about, and this isn’t the exact number, but there’s about 470 total inmates at Orange County Jail and about 110 of them are officially ICE detainees.
And how it’s supposed to work is they’re supposed to be kept in a separate wing, although reporting from the New York Times has indicated that at least on one occasion documented from the Times, someone that was supposed to be in what’s called the ICE wing was actually in the general population, which is not how that’s supposed to work.
So, Noelle, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the report that came out, Denied Care, Denied Dignity.
This is something that was circulated in Signal groups as we were organizing over what was proposed for Chester. And I think it kind of got lost in the shuffle. So I’m hoping you can tell us a little bit about the findings of the report.
Noelle: Sure, I can share a bit of the background on how we started developing this report. This is our third report documenting the conditions of medical neglect in detention centers in New York State, specifically, Orange County Jail. For this report, this captured referrals that we received between January 2022 and May 2024. During this time, we received overall 92 referrals to our medical providers network. 37 of these referrals were for New Yorkers across the country. 19 of these were for clients detained in New York. And these were the individuals profiled in the report. And to share a bit more on our methodology for analyzing the medical data, the medical letters serve as a primary data source for this report. So we receive requests for medical legal advocacy for legal health assessments to our medical providers network.
And upon receiving these requests for referrals, we’ll partner with volunteers for MPN to conduct medical records reviews, to also evaluate the adequacy of care provided, and then to identify any violations of established medical standards. We then work with these doctors who will synthesize their findings into advocacy letters that the legal teams then use to support their clients’ And so these are the letters we’re referring to that serve as a primary data source for the report.
And for these 19 individuals, they each had critical gaps in their medical care while detained by ICE. And so we also worked with healthcare professionals to analyze the data from these medical letters and we found patterns that we ended up categorizing to four different types of failures of medical care, but they also overlap. Some examples we’ll share is when people come into OCJ, they will not receive follow-up care for conditions they had prior to OCJ. They’ll either have care that was supposed to be planned but was never completed, care that was provided only after significant delays, and sometimes care is never planned at all. What this looks like is, for example, someone has come in diagnosed with glaucoma in one of his eyes and he had already been prescribed daily eye drops to manage pressure and to prevent vision loss. But once he was detained, he was denied access to his medication and that puts him at risk of irreversible optic nerve damage and blindness. He was also withheld lidocaine or medication for post dental extraction pain. And in another instance, he was denied hemorrhoid treatment. So these are just overlaps of a denial of medical care. We’ve also seen people being given really insufficient pain medication treatment for, for example, for chronic back pain, someone was just given a mattress. Another patient was, another individual was denied anesthesia for a tooth extraction, which is a pretty very severe withholding of adequate medication care.
We’ve also seen folks being denied necessary tooth extractions or receiving a botched spilling procedure which resulted in facial pain and swelling. Or they’ll be experiencing chronic pain and they’re just prescribed over-the-counter medication and they really need chronic pain management. And we also see this in mental health care plans as well.
Another individual was suffering from major depressive disorder with psychotic features, but he was prescribed an antidepressant dosage that was way below the recommended therapeutic level. And that can lead to an escalation of psychotic episodes, suicidal ideation, or complete functional impairment. And these are patterns. Many times, folks will receive multiple instances or have experienced multiple instances of denial of medication or improper treatment.
BJ: Yeah, it’s sort of astounding to me when you compound that with sometimes the lack of or inadequate access to legal counsel or the reports of people that were supposed to be seen by an attorney that then got shipped off in the dead of night without anyone knowing about it. Let me ask you … Because OCJ in particular has a history, right? Like it has a history of previously there was a hunger strike there. The New York City ACLU has previously documented some of the issues at OCJ. Did that play a role in selecting OCJ as the subject for this report?
Noelle: We selected OCJ because the greatest number of referrals came to us from OCJ. It’s the primary detention center with lapses of medical care where we’re receiving referrals, unfortunately.
BJ: Wow, okay. So, you know, and this is just my opinion. It doesn’t sound like Steve Neuhaus who is the County Executive, ever got the message, right? In terms of properly taking care of the prison population here.
As I think I mentioned before we started recording that the Monroe Gazette has asked people to send ice scrapers to his office to encourage him to cancel the contract between Orange County and ICE DHS, which is, I’ve been told from members of the legislature, only he can terminate the agreement specifically.
So it has to come from him. Let me ask, because these findings are alarming. Anytime anyone has been denied basic medical care, it’s a denial of their human rights. What steps were taken after the report was completed to share this with Orange County?
Noelle: We reached out to organizations based in Orange County to share our report since local officials are more likely to listen to folks that are advocating based within Orange County. we’ve reached out to, alongside the Dignity Not Detention Coalition, have reached out to a couple of folks. We, from what we’ve been hearing through our work with the coalition … There’s been some interest and concern, but... many have taken more the position that further investigation is needed before action can be taken. We’ve also reached out to some outlets and have been able to speak about our report in a few with some local media.
BJ: And what’s the response been like from the county itself in terms of the report? Because I remember looking through this and it came after we had already talking to a number of organizations that were reporting similar issues and had also mentioned the historical problems at OCJ. But what did the county say in terms of this report?
Noelle: That I am not too sure of.
BJ: Well, I can tell you from what we saw, I have to preface this. And I know we talked about it before I started recording. But so for people listening to The Monroe Gazette has documented a number of instances where we’ve submitted FOIL requests to Orange County. Orange County then delays them repeatedly. And we’ve caught County Attorney [Rick] Golden stating that there are no records for some of these requests, lo and behold, for us to have some of the records that he claims does not exist.
We also pressed him quite a bit, and this is probably getting into the weeds, but there’s a court case that’s going on concerning Gonzaga Park and Orange County and claims made by the village of South Blooming Grove that Rick Golden was present at a meeting, which he publicly claims he’s not. There’s been, this is a long way of saying that we have concerns about statements that come from Orange County, statements that come from County executive Neuhaus, you know, we’ve documented him specifically on issues of immigration lying.
For example, during his county address one year, he told the story of for some reason he was at the border. You know, for whatever reason, a county executive in upstate New York is at the southwestern border. You know, he claimed that he was down there in a man cross that allegedly had enough fentanyl on him. And this is a direct quote, to kill everyone in New York City. Of course, that wasn’t true.
But that’s just to give people listening a kind of the context of what the response from the county when we do try to get answers from them on issues about OCJ or issues just about general operations. And the one thing I did see was Golden kind of dismissing this report saying that the findings weren’t true.
But then the Monroe Gazette did reach out to him and said, OK, well, if you’re disputing this report that was put out, surely, you you you’ve issued some kind of response or you’ve talked to the people at NYLPI about about their findings.
Pictured Above: The Monroe Gazette first reached out to Orange County to discuss the NYLPI report back in February. As of this writing in April, we have received no response from either County Executive Steve Neuhaus or County Attorney Rick Golden about the report.
BJ: Has there been any communication with Rick Golden since the report came out?
Noelle: No, they have not reached out to us.
BJ: Yeah, that’s, I figured, I mean, I was kind of teeing you up for that. Yeah, but that’s just, it’s unfortunate and it’s frustrating. And so that kind of brings me to, you know, I mentioned the Melt ICE event in Orange County, which again is Sunday, April 12th at 1pm at the Village Green, which is South Church Street and Main Street in Goshen. So people that are interested in having Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus — who again is the only person who can do this, terminate the agreement between Orange County and DHS ICE to house detainees at Orange County Jail — they should come out.
Let me ask you, after the report came out, has there still been investigations or exploration as to what’s going on in Orange County Jail? Is it still something that you guys are keeping track of?
Noelle: Yes, in the sense that we continue to receive referrals from advocates representing clients detained in Orange County Jail. We received a as recently as last week.
BJ: Oh wow
Noelle: Yeah.
BJ: What can people do, and this is really the next to last question for you, what can people do who are listening to this who are interested, I mean, obviously we’ll post to the report, we’ll make sure people can see it when we run the transcript for this. So we’ll make sure people are aware of it …
But what can people do to help the work that you do and to also help the detainees at Orange County Jail?
Noelle: I would encourage folks to join the groups that are organizing locally in Orange County to fight back for the closure of Orange County Jail.
This includes the Dignity Not Detention Coalition, which is in contact with orgs in Orange County. The coalition is also running a hotline in Orange County jail where folks can reach out. I would also encourage folks to try to visit folks who are detained to join the letter writing events that the coalition host to join the phones apps as well to join in actions. Sharing about the issue to the elected officials continuing to raise the issue. I would say that really these detention centers were in our design to isolate people from community and to make them feel like they’re alone and that people have forgotten about them.
And so what we can do as community is to show up and to let them know that we’re still fighting for them and that we haven’t forgotten and to continue to reach out. Show up and tell them that we’re still fighting for them and that we have a good bottom and to continue to reach out.
And to try to fight for the passage of legislation that would terminate contracts with Orange County Jail because ultimately, while reforms would be great, while oversight and accountability would be great, the only way to really ensure that people don’t suffer is to terminate these jails. And you can do that by passing the Dignity not detention act and also related legislation like New York for All, which would, end collaboration between local government and ICE.
BJ: Yeah, and just for people listening, you know, I keep I keep talking about the big five bills to protect us from the Trump regime. You know, it’s it’s New York for all. It’s the New York melt act. It’s the New York Dignity Not Detention Act. It’s the Privacy Act and it’s the Health Act. And currently our state senator, James G. Skoufis, does not support New York for all. He does support the melt act. Although I think that that seems to be reluctant on his part. And our state assemblymen for people that are listening to us in our typical coverage region, which is Monroe-Woodbury, your assemblyman, Chris Eachus who’s a Democrat, does not support any of these bills.
And then if you live in one part of Monroe, you are unfortunately represented by Carl Brabenec who is one of the few Republicans who also does not support any of these bills.
It’s frustrating to me that January 7th was the first day in a state where we have a Democratic trifecta, they did not pass any of these bills including New York for all. So I’m glad that you mentioned that because that’s, it’s infuriating to me. Like we have had all this time to pass these bills and as we record this, none of those bills have been passed, although it looks like the melt act will survive in some form.
Let me ask you my last question. So specifically about NYLPI, what, if people are listening to this and they’re learning about you for the first time, how can they support the work that you do?
Noelle: I would say get organized. The work that we do is because we’re fighting for the health and safety of our communities in New York, but any of the policies or reform that we’re fighting for can only be passed when our communities want it and are also pressuring our representatives to pass these bills. And the more we’re organized, the more we build collective power, the more effective our work can be.
BJ: Yeah, I agree. We’ve been telling people to organize local signal groups with their neighbors. Is there anything that, you know, I didn’t ask you that you think is worth mentioning?
Noelle: Concerning claims that the data is not being sufficient to potentially reveal any patterns at Orange County Jail, I would... I would say that the experiences of 19 people should be enough. And even if one person was experiencing this, should already because for some kind of urgency for investigation or accountability. And so I would hope that representatives with the ability to terminate the contract would see these experiences and for this to be enough. I’m not sure how many people, like how many people would be needed to establish a pattern is my question. I think the experiences of 19 people should already be sufficient.
BJ: Our philosophy is that everybody counts. If it’s one person that has a problem, the problem should be addressed. I totally agree with that.
Noelle: I appreciate all the work that you’re doing documenting this, not letting the pressure up and making sure that the support gets out there and does the work that needs to do.
BJ: Well, thank you. Let me me put in one more point before we go. So again, Melt ICE in Orange County. It’s a rally to end Orange County’s contract with ICe for the ICE detention wing at Orange County Jail. There’s over 100 people that are held currently there. It’s a significant chunk of the OCJ population. So it’s incredible to me that we are holding so many people there often without them receiving their due process or adequate access t attorneys and to basic medical needs.
So if you are as outraged as I am, it’s Sunday, April 12th at 1pm at the Village Green. That’s South Church Street and Main Street and Goshen. We’ll post the link for people who are interested in attending. You can RSVP here.
