Government's own experts found 'barbaric' and 'negligent' conditions in ICE detention
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Biden administration is under intense political pressure from Republicans over immigration, who accuse the president of being too lenient toward migrants. Now, the administration is locking up more unauthorized immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention facilities, and NPR has exclusively obtained more than 1,600 pages of confidential inspection reports examining conditions inside those facilities. They describe barbaric practices, negligent medical care, racist abuse and filthy conditions. NPR's Tom Dreisbach reports. And just a warning - this story includes some disturbing details.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: There's this home video of Kamyar Samimi in the 1990s, playing with his two young daughters on a slide at a little green park in Colorado at dusk.
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UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Laughter).
DREISBACH: He was born in Iran, moved to the U.S. to study computer science in the 1970s. He got a green card, built a family. And on this video, he tells his daughter in Farsi to wave hi to grandma back in Iran.
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KAMYAR SAMIMI: (Speaking Farsi).
NEDA SAMIMI-GOMEZ: He loved it here.
DREISBACH: That's one of his daughters, Neda Samimi-Gomez. Neda told me that, growing up, you could always find her dad with a can of Pepsi in his hand, smelling like oil from his job as a mechanic, watching NASCAR and other American TV.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: We would sit down in the summers and watch "Law And Order." That was our thing. Like, he wanted me to become a lawyer.
DREISBACH: 'Cause of "Law And Order"?
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: 'Cause of "Law And Order." Yeah.
DREISBACH: Kamyar Samimi also struggled with drugs. It started as a kid back in Iran when he was given opium for tooth pain. In the U.S., he was prescribed methadone, which he took to manage opioid use disorder for more than two decades. He and Neda were close. But by the time she was an adult, they didn't see each other all the time. Then came November 2017.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: We had been trying to reach him to invite him over for Thanksgiving, and we weren't able to get a hold of him on his phone at all.
DREISBACH: You must have been worried during that...
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: Yes.
DREISBACH: ...Time.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: And then even more so worried when I found out he was detained by ICE.
DREISBACH: Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested her dad and taken him to an ICE detention center in Aurora, Colo. Kamyar Samimi was a lawful, permanent resident. But back in 2005, he pleaded guilty to possessing less than a gram of cocaine and was sentenced to community service. Twelve years later, ICE decided that conviction meant they could deport Kamyar. His family was worried, but thought it was just a paperwork issue. Then, two weeks later, an ICE officer dropped off a business card at Neda's work and said to call.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: The officer picked up the phone and said, we don't know if anyone's been in touch with you, but we want you to know that your father passed away over the weekend.
DREISBACH: ICE had waited two days before contacting the family. The officer said Kamyar died of cardiac arrest, and it fell to Neda to break the news to her mom.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: I can still hear my mom scream on the phone when I told her. It's just, like, always under my skin.
DREISBACH: At first, the private corporation that runs the detention center, GEO Group, said they acted appropriately, but Neda didn't buy it.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: It just didn't make sense.
DREISBACH: She went to the ACLU, and they sued. They discovered ICE records showing that, when Kamyar Samimi was brought to the facility, the staff cut him off from methadone cold turkey.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: It was a basic need for him to live. I mean, if didn't get it, then he couldn't live.
DREISBACH: Sweats turned to nausea, turned to vomiting, including vomiting blood clots. He screamed for help. The detention center's doctor never examined him. The staff did use a protocol for a patient going through withdrawal, but for alcohol - not opioids. On the day he died, a nurse looked at him and said, he's dying, and still waited hours before calling 911. By the time paramedics arrived, Kamyar Samimi had already stopped breathing. GEO Group settled Neda's lawsuit confidentially. They did not admit wrongdoing.
Did you ever get an apology from ICE?
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: No. No. Absolutely not.
DREISBACH: But inside the government, in a confidential report, a medical expert investigating civil rights complaints found a series of astonishing failures in this case. NPR spent more than three years seeking a copy of this report and others from investigators examining ICE detention for the Department of Homeland Security across the country. The government, under both Trump and Biden, fought their release, so we sued. Eventually, a federal judge found that the government violated the Freedom of Information Act and ordered them to send us the documents.
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DREISBACH: These documents are written by experts in medicine, mental health care and use of force, and they write unflinchingly. It was actually this report that first led me to call Neda.
I assume you've never seen this probably?
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: I don't think that I have.
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DREISBACH: The report says, quote, "the complete lack of medical leadership, supervision and care that this detainee was exposed to is simply astonishing and stands out as one of the most egregious failures to provide optimal care in my experience. It truly appears that this system failed at every aspect of care possible."
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: It says it right here. At every step of the way, my dad was failed.
DREISBACH: This was not the only problem this inspector found at the Aurora ICE processing center. In another case, the inspector found that a detainee was diagnosed with HIV but was never told. The inspector wrote that these problems could force a normal health system to close, but this facility is still open and holds around 700 immigrants in detention. And the problems there are not unique. The 1,600 pages of government inspection reports we obtained date from 2017 to 2019 and cover more than two dozen different ICE detention facilities across 16 states. They found grimy medical instruments, a cockroach on a medical exam table, negligent mental health care, inappropriate strip searches and pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and racist abuse.
EUNICE CHO: These reports are incredibly damning.
DREISBACH: Eunice Cho is with the ACLU, and she has spent years visiting clients in ICE detention and seeing conditions firsthand. These facilities lock up asylum-seekers, unauthorized immigrants as well as permanent residents the government deems deportable. Legally, ICE detention is not like prison. It cannot serve as punishment. The goal is to make sure immigrants show up for their court dates. But Cho says the reports NPR obtained show how punishing the conditions are.
CHO: They really show how the government's own inspectors can see the abuses and the level of abuses that are happening in ICE detention.
DREISBACH: Do you think the problems identified in these inspection reports - are they outliers?
CHO: Unfortunately, this is not an outlier. I think this is the tip of the iceberg. And, if anything, conditions have probably gotten worse.
DREISBACH: A White House spokesperson noted that these reports relate to conditions in the prior administration. But immigration attorneys told me that the COVID-19 pandemic helped make those conditions worse. I talked with several immigrants who have been locked up at different facilities. One man told me he was denied his heart medication by jail staff and suffered a heart attack. A woman told me how she was separated from her family, taken off her meds for bipolar disorder. And she said detention was hell on earth, and she has PTSD. Under Biden, 11 people have died in ICE detention so far, including one at the same facility where Kamyar Samimi died.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Nine-one-one - what is the address of the emergency?
DREISBACH: Last October, staff at the Aurora ICE processing center called 911. We obtained the audio, and it reveals confusion, gaps in communication and wasted time with someone's life on the line.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Can I get the address again one more time? It's not populating correctly.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: One, one, nine, zero, one - one second.
DREISBACH: First, the detention officer gets the facility's address where he worked wrong. It takes more than a full minute to confirm the location. And then, the detention officer does not know the patient's medical issue.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So we don't know what this person's symptoms are at all. Is that correct?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: No, I don't know. I'm not in control, so I can't really...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: OK. They just said to call an ambulance?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes.
DREISBACH: Experts in emergency medicine told me that information is critical for paramedics to effectively respond. On the call, the officer also can't answer other basic questions, like the patient's age.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Can we guess about how old this person is? This is...
DREISBACH: The officer places 911 on hold.
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DREISBACH: It takes more than a minute and a half before he says...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Maybe late 20s.
DREISBACH: He said late 20s. That was wrong. Melvin Ariel Calero-Mendoza was 39 years old and from Nicaragua. ICE records say he had been complaining of pain and swelling in his leg for weeks before this emergency. When paramedics arrived, he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. A later autopsy revealed he died of a pulmonary embolism. It's unclear if delays on the 911 call contributed to his death, but his family's lawyer told me the depth of indifference displayed on the call was shocking at a moment where every second counts.
GEO Group sent us a statement offering their condolences to Calero-Mendoza's family, as well as Kamyar Samimi's. They said they strive to treat detainees with dignity and respect, though they could not comment on specific cases. Regardless, Eunice Cho of the ACLU says that the government is ultimately responsible for what happens in ICE detention.
CHO: What is in these reports really should be a wake-up call for everyone, especially the Biden administration.
DREISBACH: When Joe Biden ran for president, and early in his administration, he promised to end contracts with the private companies that operate most of the ICE detention centers.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Private detention centers - they should not exist.
DREISBACH: A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security noted that the administration has closed a few of the most notorious facilities. And some local jails separately ended their contracts with ICE, but Biden has not kept that campaign promise. More than 90% of immigrant detainees are currently in private facilities. And overall, there are about 30,000 people in ICE detention - around twice as many as when Biden took office. For weeks, we asked both ICE and the White House for an interview to ask about their policies. They declined. So NPR's Asma Khalid asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the Biden campaign promise at a press briefing.
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KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: You know, I think the president is still committed to what he laid out during his campaign. I just don't have anything here to share beyond that - beyond his commitment that he is certainly going to continue to stay focused on.
DREISBACH: The White House also sent us a statement saying they are committed to moving away from for-profit ICE detention and noted that they have increased the use of alternatives to detention, like GPS monitoring. The statement from ICE said that they take their commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in their custody very seriously.
Meanwhile, critics of Biden's border policy, mostly Republicans, argue the president has been too lenient and believe more people should be sent to ICE detention. Neda Samimi-Gomez has been watching this debate play out, and the reports of another death at the same facility where her dad died hit her hard.
SAMIMI-GOMEZ: More than anything, I just don't want anybody else to deal with what I've been dealing with for the last five years. Nobody should have to feel this way.
DREISBACH: Now, she says what worries her most is forgetting the sound of her father's voice.
Tom Dreisbach, NPR News.
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