This article was first published by Source New Mexico. For more information, visit https://sourcenm.com/.
Without systemic failures in medical and mental health care, almost all of the people who died in immigration detention in the US between 2017 and 2021 could still be alive, according to a report.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported that 53 people died in custody between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2021.
Medical experts examined all but one death and concluded that 49 of them, or 95%, were preventable or possibly preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided, according to an early version of the ACLU National Prison Project report , Physicians for Human Rights and nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight.
In most of the deaths investigated, ICE medical detention staff made incorrect, inappropriate, or incomplete diagnoses; or has received inadequate or unreasonably delayed treatment.
The experts found only three examples where it is clear that a person’s life could not have been saved or that the outcome could not have been different, regardless of the medical treatment. In one case from 2018, ICE did not make sufficient documentation available to allow for a comprehensive overview of what happened.
Eunice Cho is lead author of the report and senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, which has been tracking deaths in ICE custody for more than two decades.
“Our Constitution requires that if the government takes someone into custody, he or she must provide him or her with adequate health care,” Cho said in an interview. “You can’t lock someone behind bars and deny him medical care when he’s sick because he can’t go to his doctor in the outside world. If the government has chosen to take these people into custody, they must provide them with constitutionally adequate care.”
ICE’s oversight and accountability mechanisms are seriously flawed and do little to prevent future deaths, the report said. Systemic failures to provide medical and mental health care in detention have caused or played a role in many deaths that would otherwise likely have been prevented, the experts note.
“ICE’s investigations, formal analyzes and recommendations following deaths in custody are structured to avoid mistakes and disclaim the agency’s responsibility for the deaths of detained immigrants,” the report said.
The report is based on a review of more than 14,500 pages of documents obtained from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE through federal and state public records requests and civil lawsuits. Authors and medical experts reviewed the emails that ICE investigators sent each other, some of the documents they relied on, and some of the court documents that emerged in the lawsuits over these cases.
“What all that information also showed was that ICE’s investigations into the deaths of people in custody are woefully inadequate and often give the agency a free hand,” Cho said. “These are all examples of how you can’t let the fox guard the chicken coop.”
“Even based on the documents that ICE’s own investigation turned up, it became clear that in the vast majority of these cases, if people had received adequate and appropriate medical care or mental health care in immigration detention, many of these people would still be alive could be. today,” she said.
The report finds that DHS’s internal oversight mechanisms have failed to conduct rigorous investigations, impose meaningful consequences, or improve the conditions that cause immigrants to die in ICE detention.
“ICE has done a very good job of trying to hide these facts to keep the public from knowing,” Cho said.
The review found that ICE’s investigation into these deaths “failed to preserve evidence, omitted important facts, and failed to follow clear leads of causes of wrongful death.” Instead, ICE has omitted critical facts that could place the blame for the deaths squarely on itself and the private prison companies it hires.
Among many other recommendations, the report calls on state and local governments to ban intergovernmental service agreements between state or local agencies and the federal government for the detention of civilian immigrants.
The report also suggests banning agreements that allow local law enforcement personnel to arrest and detain migrants before transferring them to ICE detention, prohibiting the physical expansion of detention centers to hold more people, and allowing lawsuits stand against for-profit detention centers that are breaking down. improve their contracts and enable greater local oversight and accountability of state and local facilities.
Although Congress has passed laws prohibiting ICE from spending money on detention facilities that have failed two consecutive agency inspections, “no facility has lost a detention contract or failed an ICE inspection during the period covered by this report is covered even if ICE death investigations reveal multiple violations. of detention standards,” the report said.
Cho said she hopes ICE will look at the report’s findings very seriously and adopt its recommendations.
ICE has not yet responded to the report. We will update if and when they speak about the findings.
“These are people they keep in custody who die as a result of their policies,” Cho said. “We would like ICE and the companies they contract to really take stock of the consequences of their actions.”
Austin Fisher is a journalist based in Santa Fe. He has worked for newspapers in New Mexico and his home state of Kansas, including the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Garden City Telegram, the Rio Grande SUN and the Santa Fe Reporter. Since starting a full-time career in reporting in 2015, he has wanted to use journalism to elevate voices that are typically left unheard in public debates about economic inequality, policing and environmental racism.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Deaths in ICE detention from 2017-2021 could have been prevented
