Seven months after her suspicious death in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, an independently run autopsy has found that 33-year-old Roxsana Hernández, a transgender asylum seeker originally from Honduras, was likely brutally abused before her May 25 death, a fact omitted from ICE’s official statement, which dedicated two paragraphs to her criminal record but none to the physical conditions described in the autopsy report.
“Specifically,” states a legal filing from the Transgender Law Center and attorney Andrew Free in response to the medical findings, “forensic evidence indicates she was handcuffed so tightly as to cause deep tissue bruising and struck repeatedly on the back and rib cage by an asp or similar instrument while her hands were restrained behind her back,” with bruising “indicative of blows, and/or kicks, and possible strikes with blunt object.”
Hernández had been moved from a private immigration facility owned by prison profiteers CoreCivic to a hospital in May, “with symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration and complications associated with HIV,” according to ICE’s statement. But ICE again neglected to mention that, according to the findings of forensic pathologist Kris Sperry, Hernández had been suffering for days.
“According to observations of other detainees who were with Ms. Hernández,” he wrote, “the diarrhea and vomiting episodes persisted over multiple days with no medical evaluation or treatment, until she was gravely ill.” The Transgender Law Center’s Lynly Egyes said in a press conference that “if she was lucky, she was given a bottle of water to drink. Her cause of death was dehydration and complications related to HIV. Her death was entirely preventable.”
It’s well documented that LGBTQ immigrants suffer additional abuses while in ICE detention, including higher instances of sexual assault, “prolonged solitary confinement,” and “the withholding of critical health care needs, such as hormone therapy or HIV medication.” According to advocates this past June, an estimated 60 people were being detained in the Cibola County Correctional Center transgender unit where Hernández had been held.
For months, her advocates have been calling for justice, including protesting outside an ICE facility in New Mexico. Now following the autopsy’s official findings, the center and other advocates this week “filed a Notice of Wrongful Death Tort Claim in New Mexico, the first step in holding all parties responsible for Roxsana Hernandez’s death accountable,” an official statement read.