Lalvay Chacha v. Decker

Background

Manuel Lalvay Chacha filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 challenging his detention and a motion for a temporary restraining order seeking immediate release. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was detaining him at Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York. The opinion states that he is a citizen of Ecuador and had lived continuously in the United States for roughly thirty-three years. After a 2018 conviction for driving while intoxicated, he served a six-month prison sentence, after which Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him, placed him in removal proceedings, and transferred him to the jail.

Lalvay Chacha had diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. He applied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for discretionary relief under a nationwide preliminary injunction requiring review of custody decisions for detainees with COVID-19 risk factors. The agency denied his request because it determined that he was receiving appropriate health care in custody, and it later denied reconsideration.

Claims and legal standards

The petition raised two due-process theories. First, Lalvay Chacha claimed that the respondents were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs by failing to take reasonably necessary precautions against COVID-19. Second, he claimed that the conditions of his confinement were punitive because the respondents had not adopted adequate protections against a widespread outbreak.

For the medical-care claim, the court said a detainee had to show both a serious medical need and deliberate indifference. Deliberate indifference required more than negligence: the respondents had to consciously disregard a substantial risk of serious harm. For the temporary restraining order, the court applied the same standard used for a preliminary injunction, including irreparable harm and the required showing concerning likely success or sufficiently serious questions on the merits.

Court’s analysis

The court concluded that Lalvay Chacha had little difficulty showing a serious medical need. It recognized that his chronic conditions increased his risk of severe illness or death if he contracted COVID-19, even though he was receiving medical care and taking medication.

The court nevertheless found that he had not shown deliberate indifference. It relied on the jail’s stated protocols, which included isolating detainees who had symptoms or might have been exposed, regularly sanitizing the jail and housing units, requiring staff and detainees to wear masks, and monitoring detainees with underlying conditions. The court noted that other judges in the Southern District of New York had found the jail’s COVID-19 precautions constitutionally sufficient.

Lalvay Chacha did not dispute that these policies existed. Instead, he presented evidence and allegations that they were not consistently followed, including claims that staff and detainees did not always wear masks or socially distance, that some areas and items were not disinfected after use, and that cleaning supplies and protective items were not always available. The court described these as serious claims but concluded that the largely anecdotal evidence did not show a conscious disregard of a substantial risk of serious harm. The court added that reasonable people could disagree about the precise policies the jail should use, but the law did not require perfect protection against infection.

The court treated the punitive-conditions claim as substantially overlapping with the deliberate-indifference claim. Because Lalvay Chacha could not establish deliberate indifference, the court concluded that he also could not establish that the respondents had subjected him to punitive conditions of confinement.

Disposition

The court denied Lalvay Chacha’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It denied his motion for a temporary restraining order as moot. The motion also raised a procedural due-process claim about whether existing procedures for testing the validity of his continued detention were sufficient, but that claim did not appear in the petition. The court said it lacked jurisdiction to issue preliminary relief on issues entirely different from those in the underlying petition and therefore did not address that claim; it dismissed the remaining motion claims as moot. The clerk was directed to close the specified motions and the case.

Judge

The opinion was written and signed by J. Paul Oetken, United States District Judge.