Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia should be alive today, his sister Rosa tells The Guardian. Instead, the 57-year-old Salvadoran man became the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee to die after testing positive for COVID-19. Before being hospitalized and dying on May 6, Escobar Mejia had been jailed at a notorious California facility that has been the site of a mass novel coronavirus outbreak. He was cruelly denied bond for release by the immigration courts.
She slammed the inhumane conditions that only increased the pain and suffering of her brother’s final hours. “These facilities don’t care about the people or the facts of their lives,” she said in the profile. “These are private institutions making money off of immigrants.”
While initial reports on Escobar Mejia’s death detailed the fact that he’d lived in the U.S. since 1980, more is now becoming known about the traumatic circumstances that caused him and his family to have to flee their home—and the traumatic circumstances before his death this month after being detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Facility.
“Escobar Mejia was the youngest of five siblings, and they left El Salvador with their mother in 1980 after one of his brothers was killed in the civil war,” The Guardian reported. “He lived with Rosa and their mother in Los Angeles until his mother died, in 2014. While his sisters eventually became US citizens, Escobar Mejia struggled in his 20s and was unable to get a green card.” Joan Del Valle, his longtime attorney, told The Guardian: “His brother was butchered in the middle of war, and he didn’t know how to adjust.”
She remembered him as punctual, saying: “He was extremely responsible. If court was at 8am, he would be there at 6am.” His family remembered that while he was no longer able to drive after losing a foot due to a workplace accident and diabetes, he “continued trying to help around the house and find work,” the report said. A friend had been driving him in January when Border Patrol pulled them over. It was then that Escobar Mejia was detained and thrown into Otay Mesa.
“Escobar Mejia’s troubles quickly worsened at Otay Mesa, which is run by CoreCivic, a private prison corporation,” The Guardian continued. “He told his sister he wasn’t receiving proper care for his diabetes, which was exacerbated by the poor quality of the food. And Del Valle couldn’t travel to San Diego to represent him due to her caseload in LA. Covid-19 quickly became a disaster at Otay Mesa”—and it continues to be a disaster.
As of May 12, ICE’s data shows it’s the most heavily impacted immigration detention facility in the country with 147 confirmed cases. Nationally, more than 880 detainees have tested positive. Rosa told The Guardian that Escobar Mejia called her about two days after an immigration court denied him bond from Otay Mesa and told her he was feeling sick. “Rosa said ICE did not alert her, but his friends in detention called her and said ‘it was not until he was gasping for air that they took him to the hospital,’” the report continued. “That was 24 April, the day he tested positive. ‘He was already dying,’ she said.”
As The Guardian notes, Escobar Mejia was on a court-mandated list of particularly vulnerable ICE detainees who could be released amid the pandemic, but by then he’d already been hospitalized. ICE has taken its time releasing others, too, even as the virus continues to sweep through facilities like wildfire and may have contributed to the deaths of two guards in Louisiana. She told The Guardian that there’s nothing she can do anymore to try to save her brother, but others who are at risk right now can be still be saved. “I can’t get Carlos back, but [ICE] can save other people’s lives, including their employees,” she said.