It . . . Worked . . . (?)

How a FOIA Request may have once again prompted ICE to release basic information it unlawfully delayed about a death in custody.

On January 24, we filed a FOIA request aimed at prompting ICE to uphold its statutory obligation and comply with its internal Death policy by releasing the Congressionally mandated report about the in-custody death of Cameroonian father Frankline Okpu.

Mr. Okpu passed away at the GEO-owned Moshannon Valley ICE prison, which President Biden opened in violation of his campaign promise and public, on-camera assurances to immigrant community activists who delivered him the presidency that his administration would phase out contracts private, for-profit immigration detention centers—a step the Homeland Security Advisory Council recommended back in December 2016.

As Kate Sosin reported back in 2018, ICE initially ignored the Congressional mandate that the agency publish information about detained folks’ deaths within 30 days, falsely claim that the press releases it’s always issued are the death report. Then ICE changed gears, releasing 2-4 page dummy death reports that mostly focus on the criminal and immigration histories of the deceased, rather than the detention circumstances that claimed their lives.

As grieving family members have repeatedly told federal courts, these dummy death reports have been riddled with inaccuracies, calling into question how seriously ICE takes is responsibility to provide truthful, complete information to the public when its detention operations claim human lives.

Because ICE stopped affirmatively disclosing Detainee Death Reviews in February 2017 after its reviewers could not rule out the possibility of homicide as the cause of death of Roger Rayson in GEO’s Jena, Louisiana LaSalle Detention Facility, families and community organizations have repeatedly been forced to sue the agency to get the records about what happened to their loved ones. And when they do manage to bring their cases to federal courts, ICE breaks the law by withholding information from them that FOIA requires the government to release. Time and again, when the information finally comes, families find the agency destroyed evidence and covered up important facts about its fatal detention operations.

History has shown the agency takes its obligations to timely publish information about deaths in custody about as seriously as it takes its obligations to keep people from dying. The two are not incidental. They are related.

So, when we noticed ICE hadn’t published Mr. Okpu’s death report within the statutory timeframe, we did what we did last year in Salvador Vargas’s case, when the agency committed the same legal violation — we filed a FOIA.

And ICE did what it did in that case - it self-corrected and published the report.

It is damning. We see why they weren’t in any hurry to release it:

Unpacking these new facts:

• Facility staff say Mr. Okpu:

  • attacked a GEO guard during a cell check,

  • swallowed a packet of synthetic marijuana laced with a tranquilizer,

  • and refused emergency room treatment.

• In response, GEO and the medical staff

  • placed him in solitary confinement

  • “documented” 15-minute checks

  • found him dead two days later.

An autopsy showed the cause of Mr. Okpu’s death was MDMA (ecstasy) toxicity. Not K-2. Not a tranquilizer.

The question that matters most right now is what the video ICE gathered from the facility showed.

And that question is unanswered by this death report, despite two months passing since he died.

Does ICE not have the video? Why not?

If ICE does have the video, why does the death report rely on paper records it knows, historically, get falsified?

More questions than answers in this report.

One thing is for certain: If Joe Biden had kept the promise he made to get elected, and been a man true to his word when speaking with the Georgia organizers and advocates who helped make that happen, Frankline Okpu would not have died inside a cell by himself in the GEO-owned Moshannon Valley ICE prison. Because ICE would not be using it. Frankline died the way he did because Joe Biden chose not to live up to his word. There is no longer any question about that.

We will continue investigating. Stay tuned.