On October 1, 2013, more than 60 men in jumpsuits crowded into the austere cafeteria at the Krome Service Processing Center, a huge Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on the edge of the Everglades. The men, detainees from various Latin American countries, were gathered for a Spanish-language Catholic service.
…Noel Covarrubia, a short, middle-aged Venezuelan with a white mustache and thin-framed glasses, stood next to his yellow bunk bed under harsh fluorescent lights, his head bowed in prayer. A devout Jew, Covarrubia had spent every morning since he landed in Krome two years earlier reciting prayers softly by his bedside, usually standing with a few other Jews who lived in the same pod.
But this morning in 2013, a guard demanded that the men sit as she began a head count. Not wanting to break their prayers, the men ignored her. The guard began screaming, Covarrubia says: “‘You have to sit down! You have to sit down!'”
When Covarrubia refused, he says, he was promptly taken to solitary confinement, where he was kept alone in a small cement cell with a toilet. Covarrubia was held there for three days. The punishment — all for trying to practice his religion — was scarring, he says.
Covarrubia’s Krome nightmare started in 2010. The Venezuelan, who is now 50 years old, came to Miami as a young man. He worked in business and technology and eventually started his own company selling corporate websites. In 1989, he married an Ohio native named Donna, and the couple had two kids before separating eight years later.
But in his adopted country, Covarrubia also had brushes with the law. In 1994, he was charged with felony battery in Miami-Dade County and later sentenced to one year of probation; in 1997, in the middle of his lengthy divorce from Donna, he traveled to southern Ohio around Christmas, hoping to visit his two young children.
Instead Donna called police, and he was hit with a host of charges, including fourth-degree assault, criminal mischief, and trespassing. He pleaded guilty and was eventually deported, in February 1999.
In his birth country, Covarrubia tried to make a new life, he says, but found himself lost, especially after his father died. So he took another flight to the United States, then lived quietly (and illegally) for a decade or so, working with technology systems in Kissimmee and Savannah, Georgia; in 2006, leading up to the Venezuelan presidential elections, the tech-savvy Covarrubia even put together political videos for his distant relative Manuel Rosales — Hugo Chavez’s leading opposition candidate at the time.
Then came more legal trouble. In 2010, another woman accused Covarrubia of assault. The Osceola County case against him was dropped before charges could be filed, but Covarrubia had again caught ICE’s attention.
Believing he would be at risk in Venezuela because of his political involvement, he decided to fight the case. “I was extremely afraid to go back to my country,” he says.
That’s how he ended up inside Krome for four years. But in the facility, Covarrubia alleges, he was targeted because of his religion. He was routinely harassed by guards while trying to receive kosher meals, he claims, and often weathered ethnic insults. Once, in September 2012, a guard denied Covarrubia and several other Jews their scheduled Yom Kippur service, he says. The men had been planning the service for three months with a rabbi and had been fasting all day when a terse guard abruptly told them the ceremony was off.
“I don’t care if you like it or not,” Covarrubia remembers the guard saying. “You’re not going to celebrate Yom Kippur today.”
Covarrubia filed a federal discrimination suit against ICE and Doyon-Akal in 2013 while he was still in detention, but after “four years of hell,” he says, he gave up. Covarrubia was granted a voluntary repatriation. He knew he would be headed to an uncertain, likely dangerous situation in Venezuela — but at least he would be leaving Krome.
