Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deleted key surveillance footage that should have showed the final days of a transgender asylum-seeker who died while under the agency’s custody last year, BuzzFeed News reports—and deleted it in spite of federal rules stating that officials are required to preserve such materials in case of court litigation.
Thirty-three-year-old Roxsana Hernández, who was originally from Honduras and was part of the so-called “caravan” repeatedly demonized by Donald Trump, died in an Albuquerque, New Mexico hospital in May 2018 from multicentric Castleman disease due to complications of AIDS, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator said. But Roxsana’s advocates say that as she was moved from a cold Customs and Border Protection cell in California to Washington to New Mexico, she was neglected and shackled “for days on end.”
Roxsana ultimately ended up at a private detention facility owned by prison profiteers CoreCivic before being hospitalized and dying while in intensive care. BuzzFeed reports that “the detainee death review said that medical professionals at Cibola noted that Hernández looked starved, tired, and weak.” Surveillance video could provide some needed answers into her condition and treatment, but quite conveniently for officials, now there is none.
“The requested video is no longer available," an officer told ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility in an August 2018 email. "The footage is held in memory up to around 90 days. They attempted to locate and was negative.” Officials, attorneys told BuzzFeed News, “should have anticipated being sued over the 33-year-old’s death.” The Transgender Law Center and the Law Office of Andrew R. Free filed a Notice of Wrongful Death Tort Claim in November.
ICE repeatedly claims death under the agency’s watch “are exceedingly rare,” which makes a case as to why any evidence regarding her death should have been preserved regardless of whether or not there was going to be legal action. The truth is that immigration detention is deadly—even an internal memo stated that an ICE supervisor warned that medical care in facilities is “severely dysfunctional” and that “preventable harm and death to detainees has occurred.”
Last month, more than a dozen groups called for the release of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV from federal immigration detention, stating in an official complaint that detainees have been “outright denied” access to adequate medical and mental health care, resulting in “irreparable harm,” and in some tragic instances, death. “The widespread abuse and mistreatment of LGBTQ, PLWHIV individuals in ICE custody is well documented,” the groups said. Unless of course, officials delete it.
Roxsana should be alive. “Her need for medical attention was obvious, it was documented, and it was life threatening, and the records we have to date indicate that ICE officials knew those three things and decided to transfer her” from facility to facility, Free said. "If DHS cannot be trusted to play by the rules, both before and after a detained migrant's death based on these records, how can DHS be trusted to continue imprisoning migrants at all?"