Leading Senate Democrats are demanding the top officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) release documents regarding the death of Roxsana Hernández while in immigration detention. ICE is supposed to release a public report within a month of a detainee’s death, but seven months after her death, ICE has refused to do so.
“It has been over 180 days since Ms. Hernández was pronounced dead and no such report has been publicly released,” Senators Kamala Harris, Tom Udall, and Martin Heinrich wrote in their letter to ICE’s Ronald Vitiello and CBP’s Kevin K. McAleenan. “ICE’s failure to release this report diminishes the systemic, traumatic, and in this case fatal, violence that transgender individuals experience daily as a result of their gender identity.”
Hernández’s horrific death while in ICE custody is finally receiving increased scrutiny following the public release of an independently done report that showed that she had likely been brutally beaten before her death. Thirty-three-year-old Hernández, a transgender asylum seeker originally from Honduras, had been moved from detention to intensive care last May, “with symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration and complications associated with HIV,” ICE claimed.
But the forensic expert’s report also found that Roxsana had been languishing for days without any care while she was in detention, echoed in the senators’ statement. “Reports suggest that while she was held at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Ms. Hernández endured freezing temperatures and was denied adequate food, water, and medical care,” they write. “During her transport between facilities by ICE, she vomited to the extent other detainees begged authorities to provide her with water and proper medical care.” Hernández’s death, her advocates correctly state, was entirely preventable.
“We request that ICE immediately release a full and complete death review and supporting documentation on Roxsana Hernández to the public,” the letter finishes. “We also request that ICE and CBP each provide us with complete accounting and documentation of the specific training that their officers, agents, and contractors receive related to the processing, medical evaluation and care, and safety of transgender individuals in custody.”