42 Deaths in us immigration custody under trump administration raise transparency concerns

A record number of deaths in US immigration custody under the Trump administration has left loved ones searching for answers amid a lack of transparency over key investigations, The Guardian has found.

Autopsy reports and mandated ice reports raise questions about medical care and disease transmission.

Autopsy reports and ICE reports mandated by Congress, as well as 911 calls collected by The Guardian, raise serious concerns about the quality of medical care, alleged inadequate or haphazard responses to emergencies, and the contraction of diseases and infections inside detention facilities that in some cases contributed to detainee deaths.

Families and their attorneys, as well as immigration advocates and Democratic elected officials, have struggled to navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth of multiple federal agencies, local medical examiners and coroners, walled-off detention facilities, and, in some cases, local law enforcement to obtain answers about the many deaths.

Just in the last week, Afghan asylum seeker Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, who had worked with US special forces in military operations in his home country, died in ICE custody in Texas. Then 19-year-old Royer Perez-Jimenez, from Mexico, died in what ICE has called a “presumed suicide” at a facility in Florida, bringing the total number of known deaths in ICE custody under this administration to 42.

Veronica Escobar, a Texas congresswoman, said the maze of local and federal agencies and facilities, as well as private contractors operating detention facilities, is a “massive problem”. “It’s a quagmire created by choice … This is not how things should work,” she said.

Escobar's district covers El Paso in west Texas, where Camp East Montana was built on the Fort Bliss army base last summer to hold up to 5,000 detainees in tents as the largest immigration facility in the US. Escobar and fellow Democrats have joined advocates and protesters calling for the closure of Camp East Montana, where the ACLU and others have alleged poor conditions and abuse of detainees. Several deaths have occurred at the camp.

Nationwide, there have been six suicides in immigration custody in the last 13 months – the most in a 13-month period in the last eight years, according to the limited US government records available. The 42 deaths occurred among those detained in facilities scattered coast to coast, where almost 70,000 immigrants are now locked up – more than any time in US immigration history.

The Trump administration is rushing to expand detention further with plans to convert warehouses in several states. Escobar said to The Guardian in a telephone interview that the deaths across the US are “alarming and incredibly tragic”. “The federal government is failing miserably either through incompetence or abject cruelty and neglect,” she said.