Most of the deaths of detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2021 could have been prevented if the agency had not failed to provide proper medical care, the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights organizations said in a report released Tuesday. The latest report builds on existing ACLU research into ICE detention deaths.
“The vast majority of deaths that occurred in immigration detention could have been prevented if ICE had provided adequate medical care to people in detention,” Eunice Cho, a lead author of the report and a senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, said.
The 76-page report, a project of the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and American Oversight, examines the deaths of 52 people in ICE custody from Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2021. ICE detainees are typically awaiting immigration hearings, sometimes for years, including those seeking asylum in the U.S.
The report’s authors analyzed more than 14,500 pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, state public record requests and civil litigation. The deaths and their corresponding records, including ICE’s investigatory reports, were then reviewed by six medical experts, according to the report.
The medical experts, which include an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University; the co-director of the internal medicine residency health equity track at UT Health in San Antonio; and an associate professor of medicine and director of the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, concluded that of the 52 deaths reported in the five-year period, 49 were preventable, likely preventable or possibly preventable, the report said.
Three deaths were deemed not preventable.
“I really saw significant deviations from what is really considered standard of care,” said Dr. Chanelle Diaz, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center who reviewed the detainee records for the report.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the report. The agency has said that it “takes very seriously the safety of those in its custody and remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure and human environments. Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.”
The agency has said no detainee is denied emergent care.
In one case highlighted in the report, which analyzed a series of ICE documents, Jesse Jerome Dean Jr., a 58-year-old man from the Bahamas, died from an undiagnosed gastrointestinal hemorrhage while detained at the Calhoun County Jail in Michigan. Although Dean was unable to eat, lost about 20 pounds in three weeks and had severe nausea, the detention’s medical staff did not take him to be seen by a physician, the report said citing ICE’s investigation into Dean’s death. Dean collapsed on the floor twice and was moved to a medical observation unit the night before he died, the report said, but was still not referred to a doctor or an advanced practice provider.
A nurse claimed to have checked on Dean during the night, but according to ICE’s own reports on his death, the nurse never did, and Dean died the next day on the way to the hospital.
The Calhoun County sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Dean’s death.
In another case, Kamyar Samimi, a 64-year-old man from Iran, died in December 2017 after staff at the Aurora Detention Center in Colorado discontinued his medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder that he had been prescribed more than two decades after being exposed to opium as a treatment for pain in Iran, the report said citing details included in ICE’s investigation into Samimi’s death. Without his prescription, Samimi went into withdrawal and “deteriorated rapidly, experiencing nausea, repeated vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, and seizures, until he passed away sixteen days later,” the report said.
Diaz said Samimi’s case was a “completely preventable death.”
“His death was specifically related to the fact that he was detained. His treatment was stopped and his acute withdrawal was not treated and it just really was clear to me just that he was treated really inhumanely by the medical team,” she said.
The detention center’s operator, GEO Group, did not respond to a request for comment about Samimi’s death.
Michele Heisler, the medical director at Physicians for Human Rights and a medical expert reviewer of the report, said it was striking how “egregious” the cases were in terms of providing “poor medical care, wrong medical care, inadequate medical care, and the lack of monitoring.”
The report includes descriptions and a timeline of some of the detainee deaths and why doctors believed based on this information that a death was potentially preventable.
Write a Reply or Comment
You should Sign In or Sign Up account to post comment.