In his dreams,
Aliaksei Shcharbachenia is on a plane with an immigration agent’s hands wrapped around his neck. When he wakes up, he’s freed from the memory of his traumatic and botched deportation attempt last month — but then he’s stuck languishing in Farmville, Virginia.
The 35-year-old asylum-seeker from Belarus has spent nearly a year at Farmville Detention Center. There, he says, he’s experiencing medical neglect as a tumor grows on his arm.
“It hurts when you touch it,” Shcharbachenia told The Intercept, holding his arm up on a video call to show a growth the size of an egg. He said he’d lost feeling in the fingers on his right hand, and though he requested to see a specialist in December, as of last week he hadn’t seen one nor received a diagnosis. Instead, as Shcharbachenia attested in an internal oversight complaint to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government illegally tried to deport him back to Belarus, where he fled political persecution in 2021.
Shcharbachenia is one of thousands of immigrants being held in detention facilities where the federal government or private contractors control their access to food and medical care. Soon tens of thousands more could be joining him, as the Trump administration and Congress move to rapidly
expand the deportation
and
detention machine
. And advocates warn that Farmville,
purchased
last year by private prison contractor CoreCivic for
$67 million
, has long been dogged by allegations of neglectful and unsanitary conditions.
“Dogs” live better than detainees there, Shcharbachenia told The Intercept. “I want people to know what really happens inside here.”
The Intercept spoke to Shcharbachenia via a Russian translator arranged by an abolitionist organization, Free Them All VA, and reviewed several complaints he submitted to the DHS Office of Inspector General about the lack of medical attention for the enlarged mass on his arm and his treatment on the attempted deportation flight
… [more]
