Second ICE detainee dies from COVID-19 in Georgia facility

A second person who was being held in a sprawling federal immigration detention center in southwest Georgia has died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to Stewart County Coroner Sybil Ammons.

Ammons declined to identify the 70-year-old man but said he died Monday evening at Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital after being held at Stewart Detention Center, located just outside Lumpkin, the county seat. The detainee, who suffered from diabetes and hypertension, had been hospitalized since Aug. 4, Ammons said.

ICE declined Tuesday to provide additional details beyond confirming that a Costa Rican detainee had died at a Georgia hospital.

In May, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, 34, a Guatemalan man, died from COVID-19 after being held at Stewart. He had been hospitalized in Columbus since April 17 with symptoms of COVID-19, according to ICE.

Baten-Oxlaj is among 154 Stewart detainees who had tested positive for the disease, as of Friday, according to ICE’s figures. Stewart, which has capacity for 1,900 detainees, has held people from more than 140 countries and nearly every continent.

CoreCivic — the Nashville-based corrections business that operates Stewart through agreements with Stewart County and ICE — confirmed Tuesday that 79 of its employees who work at the facility had tested positive for the disease. Of those, 64 had recovered and been medically cleared to return to work. The rest are recovering at home, according to CoreCivic.

“I have worked very close with them over the years and this has been probably the worse challenge they have had to deal with here,” Ammons said of the immigration detention center.

Nationwide, 4,417 ICE detainees have tested positive for COVID-19. That represents about 21% of ICE’s total detainee count from Friday at 21,494. Three other detainees who were being held by ICE outside of Georgia have died from the disease.

The man who died in Georgia on Monday is the sixth Stewart detainee to die since 2017. Two detainees hanged themselves in their solitary confinement cells. A third died in 2018 from pneumonia. Last year, a fourth man died from a heart infection and multi-organ failure.

Stewart ranks third — behind Chattahoochee and Echols — among Georgia’s 159 counties for its number of confirmed COVID19 cases per 100,000 residents, according to the state Department of Public Health. South of Columbus and Fort Benning, Stewart is home to about 6,600 people, more than a third of whom live in poverty. As of Monday afternoon, 255 residents had tested positive for COVID-19.

At the Four County Health and Rehabilitation nursing home in Richland, 51 residents have tested positive for the disease and eight have died from it. Ammons said she knows of two other Stewart residents who have succumbed to COVID-19.

ICE’s critics have called on the agency to free vulnerable detainees amid the pandemic.

“This was an awful and preventable tragedy,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South. “There is no reason that a 70-year-old should have been held at a deadly facility in the midst of a pandemic. How many more tragedies at Stewart before people are released and the government shuts down this horrendous facility?”

To prevent the spread of the disease at Stewart, ICE is screening new detainees for COVID-19 and segregating those with fevers and respiratory symptoms.

ICE said it has released more than 900 detainees across the nation who might be at higher risk for severe illness.

“The health, welfare and safety of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees,” ICE says on its website, “is one of the agency’s highest priorities.”

CoreCivic said it is working with local and state health departments to conduct COVID-19 testing.

DAVID GOLDMAN/AP A 70-year-old man who died Monday of COVID-19 was among 154 ICE detainees infected with the virus while being held at Stewart Detention Center.