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Julio Cesar Chirino Peralta is the 12th person to die since the beginning of the Biden administration. Chrino is the second person to die at the Port Isabel Detention Center, outside of Laguna Vista, Texas, during that time.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Chirino’s death last week. The 32-year-old man died of heart failure brought on from complications with leukemia, according to ICE.
Chirino, who was from Nicaragua, crossed into the U.S. near Brownsville on Sept. 10. Two days later he was sent to an ICE field office in Harlingen, then taken to Port Isabel Detention Center. He was put on an immediate deportation order.
On Oct. 5, ICE admitted Chirino to Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen for “left side weakness and to rule out a stroke.” He died three days later.
Port Isabel Detention Center, which is usually the last place migrants are held before being deported to their home countries, has had numerous issues through the years.
“We know that Port Isabel [Detention Center] has had a really long history of problems,” said Stacy Suh, program director for Detention Watch Network. “Unfortunately, these conditions at Port Isabel are emblematic of the detention system as a whole.”
Earlier this year, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found Port Isabel Detention Center violated numerous standards for detainee safety. The OIG found that the detention center did not have enough medical staff in relation to its detainee population. The medical staff the Port Isabel Detention Center did have was not enough for even the minimum amount of detainees the facility could hold.
Sexual and physical violence against detainees by staff, hunger strikes, inadequate medical care and disregard of COVID-19 protocols during the first years of the pandemic have all been documented at Port Isabel Detention Center. A book written by a former security guard at Port Isabel Detention Center detailed a policy of silence at the facility that allowed rape and torture to happen with impunity.
Biden campaigned on shutting down for-profit immigration detention centers in 2020. However, though immigration officials reviewing detention centers across the U.S. have found numerous issues with them, the Biden administration has only closed one. In an executive order, Biden ordered the federal government to phase out its contracts with private prison facilities except, notably, detention centers maintained by ICE.
But unlike most detention centers in the U.S., ICE operates most daily operations at Port Isabel Detention Center, including medical services. Still, the Biden administration could shut the processing center down.
Both Democrat and Republican officials are pressuring Biden to address the influx of migrants at the southern border. The response has been to fast-track federal construction of the border wall, though the president — and those criticizing the move — said the wall wouldn’t work.
There are now more than twice as many migrants detained in detention centers than when Biden first took office, according to the Detention Watch Network.
Diego Fernando Gallego-Agudelo, a Colombian man, was the first detainee to die under the Biden administration. He died 13 days after being detained in Rio Grande City and transferred to the Port Isabel Detention Center. His cause of death is listed as heart failure, according to ICE.
