First ICE detainee to die after testing positive for COVID-19 had been denied bond last month

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday May 07, 2020 · 8:41 AM PDT

2020/05/07 · 08:41

POMPANO BEACH, FLORIDA - MAY 01: Dr. Franklyn Rocha Cabrero holds a sign reading, ' Libertad Para Todos, Free Them All,' as he joins with protesters outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Broward Transitional Center on May 01, 2020 in Pompano Beach, Florida. The protesters are demanding that ICE release people from the facility to their families and ensure that immigrants and detention center personnel receive prompt testing and treatment for coronavirus. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, a 57-year-old Salvadoran man who came to the U.S. in 1980, has become the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee to die after testing positive for COVID-19, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports. Escobar Mejia had been jailed at a California facility since January before being hospitalized on April 24 after he showed symptoms. “He received a blood transfusion on Tuesday, but his body had already been too weakened by the virus,” the report continued. He died the next next morning while on a ventilator.

One of his sisters, Rosa, told The Union-Tribune that a judge had denied him bond to be released from the notorious Otay Mesa Detention Facility nine days before being hospitalized. The report also said that Escobar Mejia had been on a court-mandated list of particularly vulnerable detainees who could be released amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, but by then he’d already been hospitalized. “’Why is there so much injustice in this world?’ Rosa said in Spanish, crying in an interview in the days before her brother’s death,” the report continued.

“ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the death of Mejia, who became the 11th immigrant to die in government custody this fiscal year,” BuzzFeed News reported. “As of Wednesday, 705 detainees had tested positive for the virus, 132 of whom were located at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The agency has tested 1,460 detainees,” a number that pales in comparison to the thousands of people that ICE has in detention—and who don’t have to be detained.

”We have been warning that this was going to happen for weeks,” immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in response to the report on Escobar Mejia’s death. “We begged ICE to do the right thing and release more than just a few hundred people. They refused to.” Immigration attorney Aaron Hall pointed to April 17 testimony where acting ICE director Matthew Albence told the House Oversight Committee that his agency had no plans to release more detainees. “Mr. Mejia should be with his family right now,” Hall continued. “But he is dead. He won't be the last.”

Even workers at the privately operated facility have criticized conditions, suing the company for failing “to provide officers face coverings or allowing officers to wear their own masks in crowded housing units … even as colleagues and detainees fell ill with symptoms consistent with the disease,” said The Union-Tribune. ICE medical units have “appeared dangerously unprepared for emergencies” even before this pandemic, one blockbuster report recently said: “For example, medical staff at Richwood Correctional Center told us that a request to see an outside doctor to set a broken bone could be seen ‘within a week.’”

Maribel, another of Escobar Mejia’s sisters, said she wrote a letter to the immigration judge who denied her brother bond to vent her frustration, but “the letter, which had been addressed to the detention center, came back to her on Wednesday. She says she’s going to try sending it again,” The Union-Tribune continued. Isabel, a Guatemalan woman currently detained at Otay Mesa, told BuzzFeed News that they were told about his death but have been given few other answers. "They wouldn't even let us ask questions," she told BuzzFeed News. "We're all anxious and depressed here."

While a number of detainees have been identified for release from Otay Mesa following a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, ICE has taken its time releasing them. Now the agency’s detainees are dying from this pandemic while in custody. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia didn’t have to be detained. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia didn’t have to die.

“We extend our sincere condolences to the family of the person who passed away in ICE custody at Otay Mesa this morning,” Monika Langarica, an immigrants’ rights staff attorney at the ACLU, said according to BuzzFeed News. “We filed a lawsuit demanding the immediate release of medically vulnerable people from Otay Mesa weeks ago, urging that release under these circumstances is a matter of life and death. Today one of those people has died because ICE refused to release him when he still had a chance to survive this deadly virus.”

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