The House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is now investigating allegations made by a whistleblower in a Department of Homeland Security memo detailing medical care at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities that was so substandard that it contributed to numerous deaths in custody and other horrors. “According to the report, most, if not all, of these incidents were the result of gross negligence on behalf the ICE personnel and medical professionals tasked with caring for detainees,” letters state.
In his letters to acting ICE director Matthew Albence and DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties officer Cameron Quinn, subcommittee Chair Jamie Raskin is calling for documents relating to “at least 17 complaints of inadequate medical treatment or oversight at nine different ICE facilities, resulting in two preventable surgeries and contributing to four deaths. … Specific examples of inadequate care include: An eight-year-old boy who had part of his forehead removed due to a delayed diagnosis.”
BuzzFeed News, which obtained and released the memo earlier this month, reported that the child, who had been locked up with his mom at a migrant family jail in Texas, had complained about a steadily-worsening earache for two weeks. When he was seen by ICE Health Service Corps staffers, the family was told he had swimmer’s ear and were given ear drops for him. But his condition gravely worsened, and he was hospitalized, ultimately requiring surgery to remove part of his forehead after an infection led to abscesses forming under his skull.
The whistleblower, reportedly someone within the ICE Health Service Corps, said that the ICE Medical Quality Management Unit found that the “inadequate medical care provided by [the detention center] was a contributory factor resulting in harm,” BuzzFeed News reported, and that ICE Health Service Corps leadership “failed to take appropriate action." Another horrific case of neglect described in the memo was “a man who was improperly prescribed aspirin—which is a blood thinner, even though he was already bleeding through his skin—for six days, resulting in the detainee coughing up blood and being hospitalized.”
House Democrats have also called for answers in the May death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez in Customs and Border Protection custody. In her letter to acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney wrote that the child, an indigenous boy from Guatemala, “exhibited increasingly alarming symptoms, including writhing in distress, collapsing, vomiting blood, and finally laying motionless on the floor for hours.
“The Department’s failure to care for this sick child appears to be part of a troubling pattern of abuse and poor treatment of immigrants in the Department’s detention centers,” Maloney continued. “The lack of treatment appears to be a flagrant violation of CBP’s own detention standards and raises serious questions about whether DHS is failing to treat children and adults with basic human dignity and compassion.”