October 05, 2018
A privately-run prison in San Antonio, Texas, is coming under review after an Iranian student filed suit against it, saying he was harassed and beaten as a terrorist because of his Iranian nationality.
Sina Moghtader was pursuing medical school when he was detained in the private prison run by the GEO Group Inc., which holds a contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The 35-year-old had fled childhood persecution in Iran for his family’s Baha’i faith. He says guards called him a terrorist for his Iranian ethnicity, and encouraged other inmates to do the same.
On June 24, Moghtader filed a lawsuit against GEO, accusing guards of turning away when other inmates beat him, broke his nose and shoved a toilet brush up his rectum. His injuries led to an ear infection that doctors allegedly wouldn’t treat, so now he can’t hear out of his left ear.
He says the medical staff also refused to provide medications prescribed for his PTSD and anxiety diagnoses, despite letters from his doctor and lawyer demanding proper treatment. According to the complaint, Moghtader was told he could see a doctor only if he pled guilty.
Authorities eventually dropped all charges against him, but not before Moghtader spent a full year in GEO’s downtown San Antonio prison.
Moghtader was imprisoned two years ago for sending threatening texts, emails and phone calls to two Department of Justice attorneys and their families. He had just lost a complaint accusing the National Board of Medical Examiners of illegally refusing to accommodate his learning disability during med school tests.
A federal judge dropped the charges against him last April, blaming his actions on a psychotic break brought upon by a negligent Adderall prescription that severely and dangerously interacted with the post-traumatic stress disorder related to his troubled childhood in Iran.
“Everyone is in prison for some reason. He did not injure anybody,” Randall Kallinen, Moghtader’s lawyer, told the San Antonio Current. “He was in there for saying words, and … he was found not guilty by reason of his mental condition.”
GEO is no stranger to allegations and negative press. Since 2012, five guards and other employees have been arrested for crimes such as smuggling contraband, including cell phones and drugs, to inmates, as well as sexually abusing them.
A June report released by Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and other government watchdogs cites medical professionals who say that, since 2012, at least four deaths in GEO prisons across the nation can be attributed to substandard medical care. An August 2016 report issued by the Department of Justice found that GEO’s prisons “had more incidents per capita” than facilities operated by the government as well as competing corrections companies in the areas of “contraband finds” and “lockdowns, guilty findings on inmate discipline charges, positive drug test results and sexual misconduct.”
That DOJ report was cited in an August 2016 memo issued by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates that ordered the Bureau of Prisons to begin phasing out the use of private prisons. The next day, GEO Corrections Holdings Inc. donated $100,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, and gave another $125,000 one week prior to Trump’s electoral victory.
Two weeks into Jeff Sessions’ career as attorney general, he reversed Yates’ decree. Last April, ICE gave GEO a 10-year, $110 million contract to build and operate a new 1,000-bed immigrant detention center in Conroe, north of Houston.
GEO has given a total of $845,000 to political committees since 2015.
Besides damages for himself, Moghtader seeks a court order for the company to “implement and train employees in the importance of not inciting violence between inmates and not denying inmates access to needed medical care.”