ICE detainee deaths could have been prevented, ACLU report says

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.

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.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-detainee-deaths-prevented-aclu-report-says-rcna156815

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