MIAMI — A federal magistrate judge in Miami has ordered U.S. immigration officials to disclose how many of their detainees and third-party contractors at three South Florida detention centers have tested positive for the coronavirus.

The court order was issued Tuesday night following a Miami Herald story that revealed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not consider its contractors ICE “staff,” and that the agency said it had no obligation to include them on its website detailing how many employees at its detention centers nationwide had contracted the virus.

The Herald also reported that the agency got around having to disclose that a Miami detainee was sick with COVID-19 because the detainee was technically no longer at the detention center, but rather at a hospital. All three detention centers in South Florida are operated by third-party contractors.

“That isn’t something we have to provide,” the agency said, later noting that ICE’s role isn’t to publish or discuss information about a third party.

The Herald’s reporting was cited in a federal lawsuit filed in Miami federal court Monday seeking the release of detainees at three South Florida detention centers. As part of the case — filed by immigration advocates against ICE and the U.S. attorney general — Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman ordered that the government file the previously undisclosed information by Friday.

As of Wednesday morning, ICE said only 21 of its employees nationwide had tested positive. However, that does not include third-party contractors that operate at least 217 of its 222 detention centers nationwide.

“The purpose of the declarations is to provide the Court with information, and the information should be comprehensive and not limited by technicalities, such as whether a guard or officer is a government employee or an employee of a third-party contractor or contracting vendor,” Goodman said in his order. “For purposes of gauging the health risk to detainees, it matters little whether a COVID-19-infected guard or officer receives a paycheck from the United States or from Akima (or some other company).”

Akima Global Services is the government contractor that operates ICE’s Krome detention center in Miami-Dade. Last week, the Herald reported that two guards had contracted the virus, and that at least 60 others had been sent home to wait for test results or to quarantine.

In the magistrate judge’s order, Goodman specified that “staff members” is not limited to actual ICE employees or employees of the United States or one of its agencies or departments.

“To the contrary, it is designed to encompass anyone and everyone who works at the three facilities — including, by way of example, employees of third-party contractors who provide services and personnel to the detention centers,” he said.

He continued: “Thus, to provide one specific illustration, if a company, such as Akima, provides services or employees at the Krome detention facility, then Akima employees who work as guards (or nurses or counselors or administrative aides or any other position at the detention center) would be included in the term ‘staff members.’ This same definition applies for all three detention centers.”

Goodman told ICE that if the clarification required them to obtain information from its contractors, “then so be it. The point is, I don’t want to be on the short end of the information stick.”

For more than two weeks, the Herald has attempted to reach Akima officials — specifically its president, Laura Mitchell, and communications director, Joseph Pendry — via work and personal email, calls and recorded voice messages as well as messages with various company receptionists. They have all gone unanswered, making Akima the only ICE contractor in South Florida that has refused to communicate coronavirus information about its detention center employees. Krome is so far the facility with the most reported coronavirus cases.

The Glades County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the Glades County detention center for ICE in Moore Haven, told the Herald on Wednesday that it has yet to have any employee test positive for the virus. As of Friday, GEO Group, the company that operates the ICE detention center in Broward, said the same.

As of Wednesday, ICE said the only two detainees in Florida who have contracted the virus are from Krome. At least 238 detainees have been quarantined after having been exposed to the virus, according to federal court documents. The practice, health experts said in sworn statements, is a violation of federal regulations.

The practice of “cohorting” — segregating affected inmates in separate areas — is actually spreading the coronavirus “like wildfire” among detainees and staff, the documents said.

ICE “directly contradicts (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) guidance in several ways, including, most critically, that ICE officials describe cohorting as the planned response to a known COVID-19 exposure, not a practice of last resort,” said Joseph Shin, an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, a founding member of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, and past medical director for the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, in a sworn statement that is part of the lawsuit.

“In these settings, hundreds, and potentially thousands of people will become infected, and many will die.”

A day after the health scholars’ sworn statements were filed, more than 200 Miami doctors, health care workers and medical students sent ICE leaders a letter urging the agency to release immigrants from detention because if there’s an outbreak, it “will strain local healthcare resources.”

“Any outbreak among detained individuals will further stress our local health care system and could result in higher community mortality downstream.”