When Pedro Juan Tavarez, a 49- year old immigration detainee died in a hospital in Massachusetts, his stunned family couldn’t believe it. Over the last year and a half, the Providence shuttle driver had been moved from one facility to another, fighting deportation to the Dominican Republic to remain in the U.S. with his family including his 23-year-old daughter. Only five days before his death his sister had spoken with him at the Suffolk County House of Correction where has was held and he had sounded in good health, apart from the fact that he was lonely and looking forward to her visit. Five days later she received a call that he was dying.
Despite high blood pressure and diabetes, Pedro Tavarez was a healthy man who exercised daily. His family has demanded an investigation as has the Dominican consulate who were only informed of his condition only two days before his death.
An initial statement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stated that Tavarez was treated for heart and respiratory conditions before he died. On further questioning by a Globe reporter, ICE revealed that Tavarez was taken to two other hospitals, one of which was several miles from the facility. The Boston Globe reports,
The death of Tavarez occurred just weeks after the Obama administration pledged to improve conditions and medical care in the immigrant detention system, which is spread out across the country in federal, local, and privately run jails. The goal is to hold immigrants to ensure their deportation, but the system has faced criticism for its cost, lack of oversight, and inadequate access to care.
Laura Rótolo with the ACLU of Massachusetts is more emphatic.
The death of Pedro Juan Tavarez, as well as the 2006 death of Vincent Murphy, another Suffolk detainee, brings to at least 105 the number of known deaths of immigrants in custody of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2003. While the details behind these two deaths remain murky, we must ask whether they, like others around the country, were caused by the failure to provide the most basic health care to people detained in Massachusetts jails and prisons during deportation proceedings.
Immigration detention is a profit making business with little transparency to a rapidly growing patchwork of holding centers. The Obama administration has vowed to change that as could be seen from the Tavarez case, which was announced to the news media, Congress, and watchdog groups within 24 hours of his passing.
It was only recently discovered that more than one in 10 deaths in immigration detention in the last six years had been overlooked from what ICE officials call “the death roster”. One of these was of Tanveer Ahmad, 43, a Pakistani New Yorker who had been held in a New Jersey immigration jail, where it was said that his symptoms of a heart attack had gone untreated until too late.
A Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s report found much work still has to be done in providing medical examinations in detention centers. In the case of Tavarez, it is only recently that the Obama administration has allowed access to reports such as those written up by lawyers from the American Bar Association who conducted interviews with detainees at Suffolk and other county jails. These found that detained immigrants are often ignored or face excessively long waits to be seen by a doctor. Many talked about the fear of retaliation if they dared speak up.
While the preliminary effort to restore fairness to the immigration detention system is welcome, this is still not addressing the fundamental problem – an overemphasis on the use of detention. As Rótolo adds,
The deaths of two immigrants in Boston serve as a tragic reminder that the need for change is urgent and that the stakes are literally a matter of life and death.
Photo courtesy of Boston Globe.
