Jose Ruben Hernandez Gomez hopes a new grievance database recently launched by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California for the state’s six immigration detention centers — including three in the Central Valley — will help provide “more of a concrete proof ... of how unsafe these detention centers are.”
Gomez, 33, said he was one of four hunger strikers who were forcibly removed from the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield in March amid the strike, and transferred to El Paso, Texas. Gomez spent a week in Texas before being transferred back to the Central Valley, and was released from Mesa Verde in mid-April. While detained, Gomez said he filed dozens of grievances for himself, and on behalf of his peers, but he said the formal complaints were “denied and ignored.”
The database project was “inspired by ...the concept of these grievances,” Sana Singh, an immigrants’ rights fellow at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, told The Bee. She helped launch the database, which is the first-of-its-kind in the state.
