Authorities confirm the wine forger's deportation – and he might be looking forward to it, given his current accommodation.
By W. Blake Gray | Posted Thursday, 17-Dec-2020
Wine forger Rudy Kurniawan has been moved away from a Covid-19 outbreak in an El Paso prison to a prison in the high desert of New Mexico as the US prepares to deport him.
His new temporary home, Otero County Processing Center, is a better accommodation than CI Reeves, the federal prison in Texas where he served his seven-year prison sentence for wine fraud. Mother Jones called CI Reeves one of the 10 worst prisons in America; it may have been a relief for Kurniawan when he was transferred last month to ICE custody in El Paso. But Otero County Processing Center is also a privately run prison that was cited for several deficiencies in a 2017 federal audit.
ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) finally confirmed this week that Kurniawan will be deported, saying: "He is currently in ICE custody pending removal."
But ICE would not confirm why Kurniawan was moved from El Paso Processing Center to Otero County, which is about a 30-minute drive away. An ICE spokesperson said: "In order to accommodate various operational demands, ICE routinely transfers detainees within its detention network based on available resources and the needs of the agency."
Otero County Processing Center had a Covid-19 outbreak of its own in May. But the ongoing pandemic situation in El Paso is more serious.
Outside the prison walls, El Paso has been hit as hard as anywhere in the US by the pandemic. Patients have been airlifted to Austin and Tucson because El Paso hospitals were full. The city used refrigerated trailers as temporary morgues and in November used jail inmates to move bodies to these morgues, paying them $2 per hour. The Texas National Guard was called in to replace inmates at that macabre job.
A study published last week by Detention Watch Network said more than 1200 cases of Covid-19 in the El Paso community could be attributed to community spread caused by ICE's failure to contain the virus in its facilities. The study said ICE did not provide adequate soap and personal protective equipment to either inmates or staff, and that Covid-19 testing was inadequate. The study suggests Covid-19 spreads in the community when prison staff bring it home.
Moving to Otero County might be safer for Kurniawan, if he hasn't contracted Covid-19 yet. But it won't be easy time for the world's most famous wine forger as he awaits a plane ride to Indonesia.
Grim conditions
Otero County Processing Center opened in 2008 and is run by the private prison company MTC. It's located in Chaparral, a remote area in the high desert across from the McGregor Range military base. Inmates complain that its isolation makes it difficult for visitors.
Of bigger concern, according to a 2017 federal audit, are non-working telephones, unsanitary bathrooms and unjustified lock-downs and solitary confinements. Also, for some reason the Otero prison was exempted from ICE's usual standards for recreational opportunities and access to natural light. MTC's contract does not require that prisoners see any natural light, and apparently many do not.
"Someone could go days or weeks even without having access to the outdoors," immigration attorney Melissa Lopez told the Las Cruces Sun News. "It doesn't make sense to me. We're in a part of the country where, for the majority of the year, we have really nice weather."
But the region can get quite cold, especially in December. Inmates told the ACLU that guards sometimes turn up the air-conditioning as punishment.
The ACLU did an in-depth report on the prison in 2011. Inmates said their recreation was limited to one hour a day in a concrete box with no exercise equipment. Inmates described the lighting in the prison as "too bright," "blinding" and "stadium lighting".
There were many complaints about inadequate medical treatment, which is a major issue in US privately run prisons. Inmates complained that everything, even serious conditions, were treated with ibuprofen. Fungal infections were common: both athlete's foot from the communal showers, and infections in other areas of the body.
Breakfast is served at 4:30 am and inmates called it the highlight of the day because there's nothing else to do. And even in 2011, when toilet paper was widely available outside of prisons, it was in short supply in the Otero County Processing Center, so much so that inmates stole it from each other.
The New York Post reported last month that Kurniawan asked ICE if he could buy a first-class ticket back to Jakarta when the time for his deportation arrived, but he was rebuffed. Kurniawan's flight ticket home will be courtesy of the US government. The exact date is unknown; ICE said in a statement that "for operational security reasons, ICE does not provide advance notification of its deportations schedules".
"They'll give him the worst seat on the plane," Kurniawan's lawyer Jerry Mooney told the Post.
At this point that middle seat might be looking pretty good.
December 17, 2020 at 06:15AM
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Wine Fraud Rudy's Fate is Sealed - Wine-Searcher
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