Last week, over 200 people inside a Bakersfield Detention Center participated in a hunger strike, according to advocates. Now ICE is threatening to suspend detainee privileges and it’s had a chilling effect on some of the strikers. Pablo Ramirez has been detained in Mesa Verde for six months. He joined the strike last week to help show a united front against the conditions inside the detention center. “They don’t test us for anything. They say they screen, they don’t even take our temperature,” Ramirez said in a phone call to advocates working closely with the strikers. “And for the new people coming, all they do is just that.” ICE officers only take the new detainees’ temperatures and ask them to fill out a questionnaire, according to Ramirez. But this week, ICE threatened to suspend commissary accounts and yard time according to Susan Beaty from Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland. As a result, both men’s dorms suspended their hunger strike. “A couple of the dorms decided to
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