For at least the third time this month, an immigrant has died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, BuzzFeed News reports. While few details are publicly available, the report said the 42-year-old Mexican national had been jailed at an ICE facility before dying in a Texas hospital on Saturday. That’s all that’s known for now, as ICE has yet to issue a public statement on the death.
What is known is people are continuing to die in ICE custody at alarming rates. On March 8, 22-year-old Guatemalan asylum-seeker Maria Celeste Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez also died at a Texas hospital. Then on March 18, a 27-year-old Honduran man died by suicide at a migrant family jail in the state. His name has not yet been made public. The 42-year-old man’s death “is the 10th since October, when the 2020 fiscal year began,” BuzzFeed News said. “The agency had eight deaths in custody in the entire 2019 fiscal year.”
Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez had undergone gallbladder surgery in Oklahoma on Feb. 9 before being returned to a detention facility the next day. She was being detained at a second facility in Texas when officials returned her to an area hospital after she reportedly began experiencing abdominal pain, where she died from “autoimmune hepatitis, complicated by septic shock and acute liver failure,” ICE claimed in a statement.
But, as ICE confirmed, she had passed her initial asylum interview, meaning she probably didn’t have to be jailed in the first place. “The agency has detained thousands of immigrants who have passed their initial asylum screenings,” BuzzFeed said in its breaking report on her death, “a practice that in the past generally led to them being released from custody.” Worsening this mass detention crisis is that ICE has refused to release even the most vulnerable of detainees, including people with weakened immune systems and children, from facilities during the current coronavirus pandemic.
Following the death of the Honduran man at the privately operated Karnes County Residential Center, immigrant and refugee advocacy group 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.” The group said that the man was a dad and a client. “The mental health impact on people who are imprisoned for the crime of seeking a safe haven is overwhelming,” RAICES continued. “The added stress of the coronavirus potentially getting inside the center is deadly.”
The group said that “Since Trump's presidency there have been at least 36 deaths of people in DHS custody, including children and adults. ICE is currently imprisoning roughly 700 people at Karnes, including pregnant women, children, and babies,” many probably asylum-seekers who again don’t have to be detained. This is horrendous. “We just had a FB Live today asking for ICE to release immigrants,” tweeted Erika Andiola, chief of advocacy at RAICES, following the 27-year-old man’s death. “We knew people at Karnes were suffering. Today this happens.”