02/26/2016 Tungol Law America Now, Documents, Immigration, Reform, Research "Fatal Neglect: Report on Deaths in Immigration Detention"

The American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigrant Justice Center, and Detention Watch Network have issued a report, “Fatal Neglect: How ICE Ignores Deaths in Detention.”

The report emphasizes that “there have been 56 deaths in ICE custody during the Obama administration, including six suicides and at least one death after an attempted suicide.”  This particular report “focuses on the eight deaths where ODO [ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight] identified noncompliance with ICE medical standards as contributing causes; the ODO identified four of these deaths as preventable.”  The report goes on to explain that “this focus should not excuse several other cases in which ODO identified similar violations of ICE medical standards without drawing causal links between these violations and the deaths,” and asserts that the “process is broken; even in the eight cases where ODO death reviews concluded that violations of ICE medical standards contributed to people’s deaths, ICE’s deficient inspections system essentially swept those findings under the rug.”

The key recommendations are as follows:

• Immediately reduce immigration detention,
• Improve the delivery of medical care in detention,
• Ensure inspections provide meaningful oversight, and
• Increase transparency of inspections, deaths, and serious medical incidents in detention.

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