A report from an independent forensic pathologist found that Roxsana Hernández, a transgender asylum seeker, was likely brutally abused before her May death while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Hernández, just 33 years old, ultimately died from severe dehydration and complications from HIV while in intensive care. The immigration agency is also compelled by Congress to release a report within a month of a detainee’s death, according to INTO, but ICE has refused to.
Instead, the ghouls at ICE have sought to discredit Dr. Kris Sperry, the forensic expert who conducted Hernández’s autopsy. INTO and “LGBTQ advocates confirmed that multiple media agencies had received the same tip from ICE and were looking into Sperry’s past,” which pointed out that “Sperry retired in 2015 after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a scathing report on Sperry’s time moonlighting as a paid forensic consultant. Sperry did not face legal action and has continued to practice in Georgia.”
If Sperry is indeed disreputable, why won’t ICE release it’s own report? “Instead, the agency erroneously claimed to INTO that its press release announcing her death constitutes its report.” But that press release instead devoted ample space to Hernández’s criminal history and deadnamed her, and not to the fact that she had likely been languishing in custody without medical attention for days, as Sperry’s report found. “According to observations of other detainees who were with Ms. Hernández, the diarrhea and vomiting episodes persisted over multiple days with no medical evaluation or treatment, until she was gravely ill.”
Hernández’s tragic death, Lynly Egyes of the Transgender Law Center said, “was entirely preventable,” with the group filing a “Notice of Wrongful Death Tort Claim in New Mexico, the first step in holding all parties responsible for Hernandez’s death accountable.” This is the second filing for wrongful death while in custody to hit ICE in just the past few days, following Yasmin Juárez’s claim that her 19-month-old daughter died as a result of ICE’s brutality.
“After Mariee became ill,” reported Daily Kos’s Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza, “facility operators ignored Yasmin’s pleas for care, even after she was too sick to take oral antibiotics. After 20 days, ICE released Yasmin and Mariee, freeing them to seek medical care. But officials had allowed the infection to progress to an extreme. Though Mariee was hospitalized the next day, she died six weeks later.”
Immigration officials operate under shrouds of secrecy. Months later, we still don’t even know the name of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent who shot and killed Claudia Patricia Gómez González, an unarmed indigenous woman, at the southern border in May. She needs justice. Roxsana needs justice. Mariee needs justice. “Accountability dies in the darkness that they’re creating,” Egyes said about officials.