The Deaths ICE Doesn’t Count |
Prisciliano Trejo Ricano spent his 29th birthday on July 10 in Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center. In the privately-run facility that can hold about 1,900 detainees at a time, Trejo Ricano felt “like a number or like a placeholder.” Two days later, in a Facebook post from July 12, Trejo Ricano, who was born in Mexico, described his worsening medical symptoms. “I’ve been dealing with a bad sore throat, coughing blood in the morning and night and really bad migraines,” he wrote. He said he hadn’t received treatment or medication and told relatives he had a bruise that refused to heal. Asking for prayers, he continued, “This is truly the worst feeling of my life.”
A few days after Trejo Ricano posted on Facebook, his family in Durham, North Carolina, got news that he had been admitted to a hospital’s intensive care unit. There he was diagnosed with acute leukemia, a type of blood cancer. By the time ICE released Trejo Ricano from custody to be with his family, the 29-year-old was in a coma. He later passed away at the hospital on Friday, July 24. A fundraising page set up by a relative to cover medical and funeral costs describes Trejo Ricano as “a confident, funny, and outgoing person” who “dominated a room with jokes and was silly with everyone he met.”
But in the ever-growing tally of ICE detainee deaths—the number is now more than 50—Trejo Ricano’s name doesn’t appear. Advocates say that’s because he had already been released from the agency’s responsibility. That obfuscation of the detention death toll isn’t the result of any oversight in record-keeping. This summer, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy requiring ICE to report and investigate deaths that occurred within 30 days of someone being released. “ICE is returning to the standard practice of reporting deaths that occur while an individual is in agency custody,” said a memo from acting ICE director David Venturella first........