A leading immigrant and refugee advocacy group is demanding federal immigration officials release people from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention following the reported death of a 27-year-old Honduran man who was being held at a notorious privately run migrant family jail in Texas. “The preliminary cause of death appears to be suicide, according to the source, who could not speak publicly on the case,” BuzzFeed News said.
“We're both devastated by this news but also very angry,” RAICES tweeted. “A number of detainees in recent days have told us how frightened they are to be locked in detention as the coronavirus spreads throughout the country. We demand that ICE release all immigrant detainees immediately.”
The man was being detained at GEO Group’s Karnes County Residential Center in south Texas, one of the handful of facilities where ICE holds migrant families and children, some of them illegally. Last year, RAICES filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties alleging ICE was jailing kids beyond the legal maximum of 20 days, violating a decades-old court agreement. The group said one child and his dad had been jailed for over 40 days at the time of the filing.
BuzzFeed News reported the man’s death “is the ninth in ICE custody in the 2020 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, and surpasses the number of deaths for the entire 2019 fiscal year when eight people died.” Just days ago, 22-year-old Maria Celeste Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez also died while in ICE custody. Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez, who was from Guatemala, had passed her initial asylum interview, meaning she likely didn’t have to be detained in the first place. In a series of tweets, RAICES called for the release of families from Karnes and ICE facilities everywhere.
Earlier this week, a number of groups sued ICE for the release of people who are at serious risk of health complications or death in the event of coronavirus infection in Washington state, saying “As public health experts have repeatedly warned, waiting to react once the virus takes hold will be too late.” The plaintiffs “are older adults or have medical conditions that lead to high risk of serious COVID-19 infection,” including kidney disease, diabetes, and asthma, and are jailed at another notorious facility in Tacoma.
Since that lawsuit, over 3,000 medical professionals and counting have signed on to an open letter calling on ICE to release people during this public health crisis, writing that “Detention facilities, like the jails and prisons in which they are housed, are designed to maximize control of the incarcerated population, not to minimize disease transmission or to efficiently deliver health care. This fact is compounded by often crowded and unsanitary conditions, poor ventilation, lack of adequate access to hygienic materials such as soap and water or hand sanitizers, poor nutrition, and failure to adhere to recognized standards for prevention, screening, and containment.”
“As such, we strongly recommend that ICE implement community-based alternatives to detention to alleviate the mass overcrowding in detention facilities,” they continue. “Individuals and families, particularly the most vulnerable—the elderly, pregnant women, people with serious mental illness, and those at higher risk of complications— should be released while their legal cases are being processed to avoid preventable deaths and mitigate the harm from a COVID-19 outbreak.”
ICE has every ability to at the very least release vulnerable folks right now, but has continued to refuse to do so. That continues to come at an incalculable human cost. “I am angry, so angry,” Erika Andiola, chief of advocacy at RAICES, tweeted following the initial report of the man’s death in Texas. “We just had a FB Live today asking for ICE to release immigrants. We knew people at Karnes were suffering. Today this happens.”