Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Report: Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention

The American Civil Liberties Union, American Oversight, and Physicians for Human Rights, with Andrew Free, published a new report today on the persistent failures of medical care and lack of meaningful accountability for deaths in U.S. immigration detention facilities. The report, Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention, found that 95 percent of deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2021 were preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care. The report also found key problems with ICE’s oversight and investigations of deaths in detention. 

Independent medical experts reviewed more than 14,500 pages of documents obtained from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the deaths of 52 people who died in ICE custody from 2017 to 2021. From this and other data, the report found:

  • Persistent failings in medical and mental care have caused preventable deaths including suicides, as ICE failed to provide adequate health care, medication, and staffing.
  • Medical staff made incorrect or incomplete diagnoses in 88 percent of deaths, and also provided incomplete, inappropriate, or delayed treatment and medication that in some cases directly contributed to deaths of detained immigrants. 
  • ICE detention facilities failed to provide timely and appropriate emergency care, and take basic precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • ICE’s detainee death investigations have allowed the destruction of evidence, have failed to interview key witnesses, and have omitted key inculpatory facts. Medical staff were also deemed to have falsified or made insufficient documentation in 61 percent of detainee death cases.  
  • Oversight processes have failed to result in meaningful consequences for detention facilities, including those whose conditions have caused the greatest number of deaths. 

KJ

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2024/06/report-deadly-failures-preventable-deaths-in-us-immigration-detention.html

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Comments

I agree that people shouldn't be dying at American detention facilities. But detaining so few migrants who enter illegally encourages more to come, and the journey they make to the US kills many more people than die in our detention centers. I would like to see some outrage over those tragedies too. The 1,457 fatalities recorded along migration routes in the Americas in 2022 marked the deadliest year on record in the region since at least 2014. https://missingmigrants.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl601/files/publication/file/MMP%20Americas%20briefing%20summary%202022%20-%20EN_3.pdf

Posted by: Nolan Rappaport | Jun 25, 2024 11:14:53 AM

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