The suicide of Cuban asylum-seeker Roylan Hernández-Díaz while in federal immigration custody at a privately operated Louisiana facility last October could have been prevented if officials had actually followed their own internal protocols: “An Associated Press investigation into Hernandez’s death last October found neglect and apparent violations of government policies by jailers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the report said.
Hernández-Díaz, growing despondent over his ongoing jailing even though he’d passed his initial asylum interview, launched a hunger strike in protest and was subsequently thrown in solitary over it. “ICE requires migrants detained in solitary confinement to be visually observed every 30 minutes,” the report said. But ”for at least an hour before he was found to have hanged himself, no one had opened the door to check whether he was alive.”
“Surveillance video shows a jail guard walking past Hernandez’s cell twice in the hour before he was found, writing in a binder stored on the wall next to his cell door. She doesn’t lift the flap over the cell door window or try to look inside,” the report said. “The last person to look in the window was an unidentified jail employee, 40 minutes before Hernandez was found. A person who works at the jail and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity says the jail later discovered Hernandez couldn’t be seen from the window.” The investigation further found he was thrown into solitary, which is torture, “even after medical staff had referred him for mental health treatment three times and documented an intestinal disorder that caused him excruciating pain.”
Hernández-Díaz had pleaded several times to be paroled into the U.S., but was denied by ICE’s New Orleans office that month, BuzzFeed News reported at the time. Under the Trump administration, ICE has in fact kept asylum-seekers needlessly detained, many in remote regions—like rural Louisiana—where it can be harder to access legal help or even just get a visitor. In the New York City area, meanwhile, ICE has been manipulating its own policy in order to keep just about everyone it sweeps up in detention, according to a recent lawsuit.
The report is damning for ICE, which saw yet another death on its watch just this past weekend. Twenty-two-year-old Maria Celeste Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez died while in the agency’s custody on March 8 from “autoimmune hepatitis, complicated by septic shock and acute liver failure,” the agency said in a statement. The release, like many prior releases following a detainee’s death, claimed “Fatalities in ICE custody, statistically, are exceedingly rare.” But as BuzzFeed News’ report breaking the news of Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez’s death said, “The death is the eighth in ICE custody in the 2020 fiscal year, which began on October 1, and equals the number of deaths for the entire 2019 fiscal year.”
There needs to be answers around both deaths, and it’s so far unclear whether federal legislators plan their own investigation into the reported violations around Hernández-Díaz’s death. Democratic legislators have condemned the reported negligence of another federal immigration agency, Customs and Border Protection, following the in-custody death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez last year. As in the case of Hernández-Díaz, the boy was neglected by officials, dying from flu complicated by pneumonia and sepsis.
Hernández-Díaz, who fled persecution in Cuba for safety in the United States only to have to spend his final months of life in anguish at private prison profiteer LaSalle Corrections’s Richwood Correctional Center, left behind three children, both of his parents, and his spouse, Yarelis Gutierrez. “He had struggled to get to this country, because he loved this country, he loved it with all his life,” she told the AP. “He gave his life for this country.”