ICE Detainee Died After Not Being Sent To Hospital For Urgent Care

Detainees walk toward a fenced recreation area at an ICE facility in 2019.An immigrant in ICE custody in rural Mississippi died of a heart attack after staff did not send him to the hospital for urgent medical care, according to a draft inspector general’s report obtained by BuzzFeed News.Department of Homeland Security investigators found that Anthony Jones, a 51-year-old Bahamian man who had been in ICE custody for more than a year, was in need of urgent medical attention on the morning of Dec. 17, 2020. The committee also found that the agency and its contractors frequently demonstrated an indifference to the mental and physical care of detainees.ICE has publicly insisted that the detention facilities it runs, as well as those that are operated by private, for-profit corporations, provide thorough and adequate medical care to all detainees.Jones, the detainee whose case was examined in the draft inspector's report on Adams, had been in ICE custody since 2019 and had previously been convicted of aggravated assault. According to the autopsy, he died of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a heart attack.“Based on a review of medical records and autopsy, our medical contractor concluded that had the Adams medical staff compared the 2019 ECG with the one conducted on December 17, 2020, it should have prompted the medical staff to call 911 and send the detainee to the hospital where life support care would have been readily available,” the report states.Dr. Elizabeth Burner, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, agreed with the assessment provided by the inspector general after reviewing Jones’ medical records.“This highlights the issue with urgent care in ICE detention,” she said.