It . . . Worked (Again?) . . .

And Biden's Death Cages Claim an 8th Person's Life

On April 17, we pointed out that it’d been more than 30 days since Charles Leo Daniel died after nearly four years locked in solitary at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. We noted that, just as with Frankline Okpu’s death, and Salvador Vargas’s death, ICE failed to post the legally required death report within 30 days Congress and its own policies require.

Today, Mr.Daniel’s Congressionally mandated preliminary ICE detainee death report appeared on its website.

So this seems to be how things will go. A person will die. ICE will blow the deadline. We’ll file a FOIA pointing out they blew the deadline. And they’ll post the death report. Fine.

Unreformed & Unreformable

In trying to understand what happened, it’s probably more efficient to say what the ICE death report does not include than what it does.

1. ICE does not explain the status of Mr. Daniel’s removal proceeding.

   1. The agency’s press release announcing Daniel’s death (filed outside the time limit required by agency policy) told us an immigration judge ordered Daniel’s removal on December 14, 2020.

   2. The Detainee Death Report does not account for why he remained at Tacoma an additional 1179 days after his removal order.

2. ICE put Mr. Daniel in solitary confinement for more than 3 years due to a significant mental illness diagnosis for which he’d previously been hospitalized without adding him to the significant mental illness tracking list.

   

   1. Daniel spent all but 2 days out of his nearly four years at Tacoma in solitary. But it wasn’t until August 2023 that his behavioral health provider added him to the SMI list:

      

   2. One wonders whether this review by CRCL, opened September 1, 2023, had anything to do with the correction.

   3. Here’s DHS-OIG’s October 2021 memo to ICE about solitary confinement of people with mental health issues, complete with ICE’s agreement to fix the very things CRCL says were still broken in September 2023.

   4. Here’s ICE’s November 2023 announcement about “strengthening protections for noncitizens with mental disorders.”

   5. Here is ICE’s policy on identifying people in custody who suffer from serious mental illness. Which is to say, here is a list of positions held by ICE personnel who failed to take the actions ICE policy requires.

What this series of events suggests is that Mr. Daniel’s death wasn’t some policy oversight. It was the result of the consistent and largely unbroken pattern of conduct ICE detention personnel, medical oversight professionals, and political leadership elected to take rather than simply releasing the man when they realized they could not deport him. ICE had a choice between hospitalizing Mr. Daniel or detaining him; a choice between deporting Mr. Daniel or freeing him. ICE—Joe Biden’s ICE—chose detention to detain Mr. Daniel to death.

This is not a system that can be fixed with stern memos and new policies, with ombudspeople and more funding. It is a system that requires concerted efforts to decarcerate if people are going to survive.

ICE Logs its 8th Death of the Fiscal Year

Last week the agency announced two new examples of its failure to care for people inside. We wrote about the death of Mr. Singh on April 15 after his detention at GEO’s Folkston facility.

Then ICE announced the death on April 18 of Edixon del Jesus Farias-Farias, 26, from Venezuela. He spent nearly a month in the hospital prior to passing away after being detained from December through mid-March at GEO’s Joe Corley Processing Center in Texas.

While ICE claims an autopsy is pending to determine his cause of death, it would be simple enough disclose the reason he was in the hospital for a month before he died. Doing so might raise questions, though. Like, if he was so sick that his hospitalization ended in his death, why was he still in ICE custody? an IJ ordered him deported on January 19. His 90-day Post Order Custody period ended April 18 — the day he died. Was there really a significant likelihood of his removal in the reasonably foreseeable future? We’ll go ahead and mark our calendars for May 18 and see if ICE answers these questions in its detainee death report on that date. But if Mr. Daniel’s case is any indication, we shouldn’t hold our breath.

Mounting Deaths, Praise from ICE

The pace of in-custody deaths during Biden’s final fiscal year is accelerating.

We are currently on track for his deadly, for-profit human cages to claim 14 adults’ lives—more than any non-COVID year during the Trump regime. And unlike that period, nobody with the power to do anything is really saying anything about it. These are the deaths we know about. Time will likely show there are more we haven’t heard about.

It is a conscious choice for the people funding and expanding this system to value its supposed benefits. Five of the eight deaths in custody have been people detained in GEO facilities. ICE knows this. Yet the agency also publishes “readouts” proclaiming the value of GEO’s services to the agency. Here’s one from April 5.

Here’s one with GEO and CoreCivic from December 31, 2023.

Here’s one specifically from GEO’s Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center on April 5.

ICE’s spokesperson has not answered my question whether the agency has concluded its investigation into Frankline Okpu’s death at Moshannon Valley in December.

It sure would be awkward if ICE Deputy Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director Patrick J. Lechleitner hitched the federal government’s reputation to a wagon that kills people preventably by suggesting GEO is a “vital piece of the national detention system enabling ICE to execute its mission.”