Conroe center reports first death of ICE detainee from COVID-19 in Texas
An immigrant from Honduras has died of COVID-19 while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a Conroe detention facility, the agency announced this week.
Fernando Sabonger-García was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. last Friday at the Conroe Regional Medical Center. He is the first case of a coronavirus death under ICE custody reported in Texas and the sixth in the country.
ICE said Sabonger-García was transferred July 26 to the medical center from the Joe Corley Processing Center. The Corley center, which is in Conroe, is one of five detention facilities under the agency’s Houston office reporting COVID-19 cases.
Sabonger-García was hospitalized after exhibiting symptoms consistent with COVID-19. A test administered the same day at the medical center confirmed that he was infected with the virus, the agency said.
The preliminary cause of death was determined as respiratory failure because of complications from the virus.
ICE “is undertaking a comprehensive, agencywide review of this incident, as it does in all such cases,” according to a news release Wednesday announcing the death. It added: “Fatalities in ICE custody, statistically, are exceedingly rare and occur at a fraction of the national average for the U.S. detained population.”
It’s unclear if other detainees at the detention center who were in proximity to Sabonger-García also contracted the virus before he was hospitalized. ICE did not respond Wednesday evening to a request for comment surrounding this case.
ICE has reported 50 COVID-19 positive cases at Corley. That number increases to 414 when counting all detention centers under the Houston office.
While Sabonger-García is the first person who died of the virus while in ICE custody at the facility, his case is the second death of an immigrant there linked to COVID. Alonzo Garza-Salazar, an immigrant from Mexico who died May 13, was held at the same detention facility but under the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, according to what that agency told his family at the time.
“We are very saddened to hear about his death but, unfortunately, not surprised,” said Katy Murdza, an advocacy manager at
the American Immigration Council based in Texas. “We have been concerned about all detention centers for months, but especially Corley is one we have really focused on” in Texas.
Murdza said the earlier death heightened concern, along with information gathered from detainees and advocates about conditions at the facility.
“We have learned about how terrible a job ICE has been doing there,” Murdza said. She added that a significant source of information from inside the center was Roger Ernesto La O Muñoz, a Cuban epidemiologist who was detained there with other medically trained asylum-seekers.
La O Muñoz recently said in an interview with the Chronicle that the conditions at Corley were “a model example of all the things you should not do if you want to control an epidemic.” He was released last month after filing a lawsuit with other immigrants against ICE and the federal government.
He said social distancing was impossible in barracks where around 30 people were held in bunk beds in close distance. “We could say that we almost slept head to head, coughing on top of each other.”
According to La O Muñoz and other detainees from that center who have spoken with the Chronicle, immigrants requesting medical care with symptoms other than fever were not given medical attention.
“For them (the staff ), the only symptom of COVID is fever, and you could consider yourself lucky if they even took your temperature,” La O Muñoz said. Detainees clearly suffering pains and other ailments such as cough, muscle weakness, nausea or vomiting would not get medical attention often until after days of requesting it, he contended.
Detainees at Corley have launched several hunger strikes to protest the conditions, detainees said. A typical method used by immigrants there to get medical attention was to make a loud noise by repeatedly banging on the glass windows at the entrance to the units.
Dona Kim Murphey, a board member of Doctors for America, which has organized several protests in front of the Corley center, holds ICE as responsible for the recent death.
“Much like we have decried the pandemic response in general, we denounce this as a devastatingly preventable death,” Murphey said.
Corley is one of two ICE facilities in the Houston area mentioned in a federal lawsuit as examples of deficiencies of detention centers in dealing with the pandemic.
The immigration agency has reported 5,415 COVID-19 cases in detentions nationwide. It said almost 28,900 detainees have been tested, cumulative since it began reporting, but only 841 are currently under isolation or monitoring.