Jury to decide if prison company liable for death

A federal jury is expected to decide this week whether a private prison company running a South Texas immigrant holding facility is liable for the death of a toddler from Guatemala in 2018.

Mariee Camyl Newberry Juárez died at 21 months of complications from two viruses six weeks after she was released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.

Her mother, Yazmin Juárez Coyoy, sued Nashville, Tenn.-based Corecivic in San Antonio federal court, claiming Mariee was healthy when the pair arrived at the facility but contracted the viruses while they were held in crowded conditions.

Jurors began deliberations Monday morning. However, they hadn’t reached a verdict by midafternoon and asked the judge for permission to go home for the day. They’ll resume Tuesday morning.

Lawyers for Juárez argued in court last week that Corecivic should have had isolation practices in place to separate the sick from the healthy.

“They failed to provide safe conditions appropriate for small children detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center,” Stanton Jones, one of the attorneys, told the jury. “They had a duty to provide safe living conditions for children in their care and, as you have heard all week, they did not do that.”

But attorneys for Corecivic said it is impossible to prove that the child was infected at the facility — and countered that she was either already sick before leaving Guatemala or infected along the way.

Corecivic operates the facility, which opened in 2014, under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since 2021, it houses only women migrants.

“They didn’t even come close to proving liability in this case,” Daniel Struck, one of Corecivic’s lawyers, said in his closing argument on Friday. “They have to prove that defendants breached the standard of care by having beds too close together in an unsanitary environment, and that Mariee caught these two viruses from a boy there. We all know they didn’t prove that. It’s simply impossible to prove that burden.”

Juárez and her daughter spent 20 days at the Dilley complex, from March 5 through March 25, 2018. Juárez testified that she took Mariee to a clinic in Guatemala for a checkup and her latest vaccinations on Feb. 25, 2018, and that the girl was in good health. They left for the U.S. later that day.

Testimony and facility records said Mariee was healthy when she and her mother were screened by a licensed vocational nurse and a registered nurse for entry into the Dilley facility’s custody.

Juárez and Mariee were held in a unit that housed 10 other mothers and their 10 children. Juárez said one of the children, a boy, was sick.

About five days later, on March 10, Mariee started showing symptoms. Testimony and medical records showed Juárez took Mariee to the facility’s clinic several times for congestion, coughing and diarrhea. She had a high fever on at least two of those visits.

Mariee was diagnosed with a virus on one of the last visits. But instead of isolating her or the sick boy, Jones said, Mariee and her mother were returned to their housing unit.

Jones said the facility, which can hold up to 2,400 people, had only 1,600 women and children in custody at the time. He claimed Corecivic could have spread out the population among the empty housing units, but didn’t do so because of the expense.

Mariee spent six weeks after her release from the Dilley complex at hospitals in New Jersey and Philadelphia as doctors struggled to reverse the damage caused by two viruses, adenovirus and parainfluenza 3.

Initially, Juárez’s lawsuit — filed in 2019 in San Antonio — sought up to $40 million in damages. On Friday, Jones asked jurors to put themselves in Juárez’s shoes and imagine what losing an only daughter is worth.

In 2020, Juárez also sued ICE in federal court in New Jersey because it handles medical care at the Dilley facility. ICE declined comment on the litigation because it is pending.

“We intend to hold ICE fully accountable for its role in causing Mariee’s death, in the New Jersey lawsuit,” Jone told jurors. “But ICE’S misconduct does not absolve Corecivic of responsibility. They’re both responsible.”