7th Person Dies in Biden's Deadly, For-Profit FY24 Human Caging System
57 Year-Old Indian National Was Detained at GEO's Folkston ICE Processing Center in Georgia
A seventh human being died on Monday, April 15, after 9 months in DHS custody, ICE announced yesterday. Indian national Jaspal Singh, 57, endured more than 290 days of imprisonment-for-profit. At this current rate (197 days into the fiscal year as of Monday), Biden’s ICE detention system is on track to claim roughly 6 more lives before October 1, making this the deadliest non-pandemic1 fiscal year since FY17, when the nascent Trump Administration’s ICE cages claimed 12 people’s lives.
This is as unsurprising as it is tragic. Anyone who pays attention to the system knows detention kills. Choosing to expand the number of people in that system is a choice to increase the number of deaths it inflicts.
Mr. Signh’s death in custody happened because of a set of policy choices Joe Biden’s administration made. That includes a decision to hold him inside a deadly, unaccountable ICE detention system Joe Biden and Senate Democrats recently moved to expand and fund at record-high levels, despite his campaign promise to end private immigration detention, and his reiteration of that promise at a Georgia car rally in April 2021.
Source: https://www.bidensbrokenpromises.org/
The latest in-custody death further cements Joe Biden’s legacy of broken promises to the people whose labor and votes he used to get elected on promises of protection and dignity. Rather than upholding these commitments to immigrant communities and the progressive base that brought him to power, Biden cosigned the agenda of the people he ran against.
Source: Detention Watch Network, Year 3 Progress Report
The Last Death of an Indian National in the Atlanta AOR
It’s early, and details on surrounding Singh’s death are sparse. Lacking those details, we might draw as context a report showing what the government’s medical reviewers concluded the last time an Indian national died in the ICE ERO Atlanta Area of Responsibility. That was May 17, 2017. The decedent was 58 year-old Atulkumar Babuhai Patel. ICE ERO ATL imprisoned him at the Atlanta City Detention Center after CBP arrested him at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
The ICE Health Services Corps (IHSC) Mortality Review concluded:
A review of Mr. PATEL’s medical records revealed that the medical care and health services were delivered outside the safe limits of practice, which either directly or indirectly contributed to his death.
IHSC Mortality Review Finding
The IHSC finding identified six categories of weaknesses leading to the conclusion medical care contributed to Patel’s death:
Lack of appropriate referral to higher level of care
On May 11, 2017, despite a history of diabetes, elevated blood pressure (181/119) and blood sugar (243), “Mr. PATEL did not receive a referral to a higher-level provider as warranted” following his intake screening with a licensed practical nurse.
On May 12, 2017, an LPN evaluated Patel in his housing unit after custody security informed them he was “banging on his door continuously.” The LPN “failed to refer him to higher level of care for his symptoms” and “functioned beyond the scope of practice, as outlined in GA’s Nursing Practice Act.”
Lack of appropriate documentation and nursing staff functioning outside scope of practice:
During the May 11 intake screening, the LPN failed to sign the electronic medical record to “accurately record the information.”
On May 12, the LPN evaluated Patel but “did not document the encounter” in Patel’s EMR reflecting the care or intervention rendered.
On May 13, the LPN evaluated Patel’s abnormal findings and reported them to a registered nurse, but the LPN did not document this in the EMR. the RN notified the on-call physician without completing or documenting an independent evaluation or assessment.
Hypertension protocol/standing orders unclear:
Despite Patel’s elevated BP, the LPN did not follow ACDC’s hypertension protocol, and nursing personnel were confused about how to interpret it.
The IHSC review of ACDC’s nursing protocols “did not reflect clear and concise physician approved protocols.”
Policies are unclear and/or out of date:
ACDC’s policy and procedures manual did not include clear and concise guidance for medical staff to follow, and did not identify action plans when immediate and/or unstable findings were identified.
Review of ACDC’s policy and procedures manuals lacked either the documentation of annual reviews or the ACDC’s clinical authority signed approval.
Nursing orientation/competency not complete.
Review of ACDC’s nursing personnel files did not include complete orientation packets, competency assessments, and/or required training documents[!]
Diagnostic studies and sick call request(s) are untimely reviewed and addressed.
May 11, 2017, Patel’s chest x-ray results showed normal findings except for a blunt costovertebral (angle formed on either side of the back between the twelfth rib and vertebral column), representing a small effusion (liquid) or scar. ACDC “medical” failed to perform a confirmatory sign-off of Mr. Patel’s x-ray results in the EMR to accurately record the information, and Mr. Patel did not receive a follow-up evaluation.
On May 13, 2017, Mr. Patel submitted an electronic sick call request with complaints of feeling ill, shaking, fever, cough, and the inability to sleep. ACDC’s ‘medical’ staff did not triage the sick call request until May 16, 2017, the date of Mr. Patel’s death.”
Why rehash all of these failures for a death that occurred nearly seven years ago of a man who Atlanta ERO imprisoned at a different facility?
Several reasons.
First, as we’ve documented previously, ICE lies about the general quality of care detained people received in its press releases announcing their deaths. The agency told those lies again yesterday in the press release it put out about Mr. Singh’s death. Specifically, ICE’s press release has the unmitigated chutzpah to claim, without reservation, “At no time during detention is a detained noncitizen denied emergent care.”
False. Flatly fucking false. Knowingly so. Dangerously so. Fatally so. They could just say nothing, as we’ve told them directly in the past. But instead, they copy and paste this paragraph into the press release, seemingly inured to the demonstrable falsehood it conveys. But just because we know it’s false doesn’t mean everyone else who reprints it does. So seeing that Mr. Patel was, in fact, denied emergent care, like so many others who’ve died in ICE custody, is helpful.
Second, we note this to point out that under the Trump administration, external scrutiny from CRCL led to ICE ceasing operations at ACDC on September 6, 2018. Trump’s ICE did something Biden’s has refused to do at Stewart, at Torrance, at Aurora, and elsewhere, which is to cut the contracts with deadly facilities. Stay tuned for more on the Torrance and Aurora IHSC Mortality Review fronts very soon.
Third, we raise Mr. Patel’s case to highlight the fact that despite the ICE Health Services Corps concluding dangerously out-of-compliance medical care at ACDC, both episodic and systemic, either caused or contributed to Mr. Patel’s death, despite CRCL’s findings and ICE’s decision to stop using that facility, it passed inspection in both 2017 and 2018.
As an Atlanta resident and independent community journalist who lived through both the decision to shut down ACDC and the decision to override the democratic decisionmaking of community to turn it into a health and resource center, I am left to wonder what might have happened if the IHSC Mortality Review were made public and if ICE pushed for consequences from the Fulton County Sheriff, who previously oversaw the jail as head of the Atlanta Department of Corrections, and his medical contractor back in 2018. Would this mother of a teenager who died at ACDC after he restarted using his old facility have lost her child in July 2023?
I realize this seems far afield from the ICE death announcement for Mr. Singh. But Sheriff Labat has been in talks with both CoreCivic and GEO to pay them to house Fulton County detained people—over 90% of whom are Black and many of whom are unindicted—at facilities the companies also use to imprison migrants. Facilities like Folkston and Adams County, where multiple immigrants have died.
At least 22 people died in ICE custody during the first fiscal year of the COVID pandemic, according to official figures.