Immigration detainees leave the cafeteria under the watch of guards. Gerald Herbert/AP On June 15, Jhon Javier Benavides-Quintana, an Ecuadoran immigrant, died of undetermined causes in the Otero County Processing Center, a detention center in New Mexico. He was 32 years old.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which recently filed a civil rights complaint on behalf of the detainees at Otero over “retaliatory use of solitary confinement,” has called for an investigation. The detention center is owned by Otero County but run by the private prison operator Management & Training Corporation. Benavides-Quintana’s death occurred less than a month after two other immigrants died while in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Georgia and Michigan.
Now, a new report by the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, and the nonprofit watchdog American Oversight reveals how “systemic failures in medical and mental health care in ICE detention have caused otherwise preventable deaths.” The study, titled Deadly Failures , relies on 14,000 pages of documents, including detainee death reviews, autopsy reports, and emails obtained through public records requests. ICE currently detains an average of 36,000 people a day across about 135 facilities nationwide.
Like Benavides-Quintana, the vast majority of immigrant detainees are held in detention centers run by private companies Medical experts consulted for the analysis concluded that 95 percent of the deaths in cus.
