Día de Muertos vigils nationwide remember immigrants who've died in immigration custody

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Advocates have been remembering immigrants who’ve died while in federal immigration custody in Día de Muertos vigils across the country. The holiday, known in English as Day of the Dead and widely celebrated both in Latin America and the U.S., is rooted in indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica and honors the memory of loved ones who have died.

Altars created as part of the observance commonly feature marigolds, incense, candles, and photographs of the deceased. One such altar was seen outside the privately operated Otay Mesa Detention Facility in California last week, where Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejía had been detained. In May 2020, he was the first immigrant to die of COVID-19 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. He’d lived in the U.S. for four decades.

“ICE deprives thousands of people of liberty each day in conditions that give rise to systemic abuse & rampant medical neglect,” American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) San Diego tweeted last week. “Otay Mesa Detention Center was site of the 1st COVID-19 related death in ICE detention in the US when Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia passed away in 2020.” Yet Escobar Mejía’s death was entirely preventable, because ICE could have released the medically vulnerable man to shelter at home, but didn’t.

“These facilities don’t care about the people or the facts of their lives,” one of his sisters told The Guardian last year. “These are private institutions making money off of immigrants.”

AFSC San Diego said a government watchdog “issued a report outlining violations of ICE’s own detention standards that compromised the health, safety, & rights of people in this facility. Medical negligence has led to the death of other immigrants at Otay, including Nebane Abienwi in 2019.” Abienwi, an asylum-seeker from Cameroon, died from a brain hemorrhage after being detained at Otay Mesa in 2019.

Like advocates in Día de Muertos vigils elsewhere, the Quaker social justice organization urged the Biden administration to act to shut down these deadly immigration detention facilities. Detention Watch Network and the We Are Home Campaign said in a release received by Daily Kos that five immigrants have died in ICE custody since the president took office. “This follows ICE’s highest death toll in 15 years with 21 deaths occurring in FY 2020.”

“Medical standards developed and implemented by ICE have proven inadequate time and again leading to preventable deaths of people in their custody,” Detention Watch Network and the We Are Home Campaign continued. They pointed to numerous reports that “have found that ICE medical care has contributed to numerous deaths and that the agency lacks urgency and transparency when reporting deaths in its custody.” One such report noted the case of Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos, whose cancer went unaddressed by ICE for years. “Throughout this time, Morales-Ramos repeatedly begged for care,” the report said. 

In Washington, D.C., advocates remembered a number of transgender and gay asylum-seekers who died in custody or soon after being released from custody. Like Morales-Ramos, a number had been subjected to medical neglect while in custody.

“Our community gathered to honor the lives of Victoria Arellano, Roxsana Hernandez, Johana Medina, and Pablo Sánchez who died because of ICE negligence,” tweeted Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement. The group said Sánchez, who was HIV-positive, “was forced into detention where his health quickly deteriorated due to medical neglect. ICE was fully aware of Pablo’s medical fragility and failed to release him so that he could obtain life-saving interventions.”

Washington Blade notes the repeated calls from lawmakers urging an end the detention of trans people and people with HIV. “There are grave concerns regarding ICE safely detaining transgender individuals,” legislators wrote in June. “Even when ICE has endeavored to set up specific detention units tailored to comply with the requirements of its own 2015 guidance on the detention of transgender individuals, its efforts have failed.” 

The fact remains that ICE is inherently threatening to human beings, especially when it comes to particularly vulnerable individuals. We know this because ICE has a documented history of intentional neglect.

While President Biden’s criminal justice reform platform pledged to “make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants,” the expansion of private immigration prisons has continued under his administration. But it is not too late. The administration can still cancel the contracts and begin to usher in a more humane immigration system.