The House Oversight Committee said in report released Thursday that internal documents obtained as part of an investigation into abuses against people in immigration custody “reveal a widespread failure to provide necessary medical care to detainees” so egregious it led to several deaths, including one incident where an officer falsified records for one man who had been thrown into solitary confinement and then later died after the officer failed to properly check on him.
“CoreCivic detention staff were supposed to check on [Huy Chi Tran] every 15 minutes, but the detention officer on duty left Mr. Tran unsupervised for 51 minutes just before Mr. Tran’s cardiac arrest that led to his death,” the committee said an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report found. Tran had been a U.S. resident for over 30 years. “Investigators found that the officer falsified observation logs to hide the fact that he had failed to conduct welfare checks over that 51-minute period.”
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This is the second Congressional report just this week alone detailing abuses of detainees by ICE and private prison profiteers. On Monday, the House Homeland Security Committee said that the mass detention agency and its private prison contractors commonly demonstrated “an indifference to the mental and physical care of the migrants in their custody,” including downplaying suicide attempts among detainees and threatening others with solitary confinement for daring to ask for medical assistance.
The House Oversight Committee’s findings on Thursday were no less horrific—or criminal. Kamyar Samimi died in December 2017 after being detained for more than two weeks at Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado, a private immigration jail operated by GEO Group. The committee said that while Samimi had been prescribed a number of medications, including methadone, which is used to treat opioid addiction, he received only a fraction of what he needed and began to suffer severe withdrawal symptoms.
“Nurses charged with caring for Mr. Samimi admitted they were not trained in understanding opioid withdrawal symptoms,” the report said, with nurses stating they believed he was exaggerating his symptoms.
“Nurses failed to consistently perform medical assessments of Mr. Samimi every shift and failed to take his vital signs every eight hours as a doctor had ordered,” the report continued. “During Mr. Samimi’s last hours, he was placed on suicide watch. He exhibited seizure symptoms and vomited and urinated on himself, but multiple calls to the on-call physician, who is required to be available 24 hours per day, were never answered.”
“[M]edical staff failed to transfer Samimi to an ER even though he exhibited life-threatening withdrawal symptoms during the week following his intake,” it continued. Samimi, a father of three and mechanic who had been a legal resident of the U.S. for nearly four decades, died. “The Committee obtained internal documents showing that Mr. Samimi’s death resulted from egregious violations of medical standards,” the report said, “and that these violations were part of systemic issues at the Aurora facility.”
As this has become the deadliest year at ICE in 15 years, the report also said that ICE has failed to release Congressionally-mandated reports on in-custody deaths. Oversight’s for the little people, you see. “Since 2018, Congress has required ICE to publicly release all in-custody death investigation reports within 90 days of any death, but ICE has not complied with that requirement for any deaths that have occurred since that time,” legislators said.
CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two private prison profiteers that jail over 80% of all immigrant detainees for the U.S., are in fact helping carry out these criminal abuses with the complete blessing of the federal government.
“Since 2017, the Trump administration has awarded its two biggest detention contractors, CoreCivic and GEO Group, more than $5 billion in contracts to operate private detention facilities,” legislators said. “Instead of holding contractors accountable and imposing financial penalties, ICE has issued waivers to allow deficient practices to continue and exempt contractor facilities from certain health and safety standards.” We fund this. It needs to stop.