Asylum seeker’s death may have been preventable
Roylan Hernandez Diaz’s long journey ended inside a white-walled cell in the solitary confinement wing of a Louisiana prison.
Nearby were the last of his belongings: a tube of toothpaste, a few foam cups, and a sheet of paper explaining how he could request his release from immigration detention. He had already been denied three times.
The Cuban man had been placed in solitary six days earlier because he told his jailers he would refuse all meals to protest his detention. The jailers put him there even after medical staff had referred him for mental health treatment three times and documented an intestinal disorder that caused him excruciating pain.
And for at least an hour before he was found to have hanged himself, no one had opened the door to check whether he was alive.
His death might have been prevented. An Associated Press investigation into Hernandez’s death last October found neglect and apparent violations of government policies by jailers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at a time when detention of migrants has reached record levels and new questions have arisen about the U.S. government’s treatment of people seeking refuge.
ICE requires migrants detained in solitary confinement to be visually observed every 30 minutes. Surveillance video shows a jail guard walking past Hernandez’s cell twice in the hour before he was found, writing in a binder stored on the wall next to his cell door. She doesn’t lift the flap over the cell door window or try to look inside. The last person to look in the window was an unidentified jail employee, 40 minutes before Hernandez was found.
A person who works at the jail and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity says the jail later discovered Hernandez couldn’t be seen from the window.
Yarelis Gutierrez Barrios was Hernandez’s partner.
She had been with him for three years as they voyaged through South and Central America, always looking for a way to reach the United States. The man she knew was resilient, she says, determined to win his asylum case, not the kind of man who would give up easily.
“I think they let him die,” she says.
Hernandez spent much of his 43 years in rebellion against the Communist government 90 miles from the United States.
In his early years, he had refused to join a youth group. Then he refused compulsory military service and protested the regime of Fidel Castro.
In 1994, when he was 18, he tried to flee the island in a boat with his father and brother. But they were captured and imprisoned.
Hernandez was jailed for about two weeks. When he tried to escape again, in 2001, he was caught and sentenced to nine years in prison. Upon his release, he continued to be denied jobs and harassed by police.
In 2016, he left Cuba for Guyana, a tiny country in South America, because he could travel there without a visa. From Guyana, he set off for the U.S.
Hernandez and Gutierrez met in Ecuador in 2016. They were among a group of Cubans camping outside the Mexican embassy in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to demand visas that would allow them to reach the U.S.Mexico border and request asylum. Mexico refused to grant the visas and Ecuador moved to deport the protesters to Cuba.
So they fled. They sold juice from a cart in Argentina, then lived for a year in Peru.
In both Argentina and Peru, Gutierrez recalls, they struggled to support themselves and were told it would be near-impossible to be allowed to settle permanently.
“In the end, we were going to come to the United States,” she said.
Through Ecuador and Colombia, they reached the jungle connecting South and Central America known as the Darien Gap. The region is roadless and lawless, controlled largely by gangs who prey on the thousands of migrants who try to traverse it each year.
The couple walked several days in light and dark before reaching a village in Panama. They surrendered at a government border checkpoint.
But in the jungle, Gutierrez says, Roylan lost the papers he had carried with him from Cuba documenting his imprisonment and political problems — papers that would be key to proving his asylum case in America.
They were detained 10 days in Panama, then taken to a border town in Costa Rica. One by one, they boarded buses and made it through border checkpoints in each country along the way: Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico. They spent several days detained in Mexico.
After five months, on May 18, 2019, they arrived at the border bridge between Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. They waited to be allowed inside.
Hernandez requested asylum and was taken into detention.
He and Gutierrez were initially taken to the same holding facility near the bridge. Men and women were separated and placed in small, cold cells.
She last saw him from across the dining room a few days after they crossed. It was lunchtime, but they weren’t permitted to speak to each other.
Gutierrez was eventually released, but an officer at the facility told her Hernandez had been taken to a detention center in Mississippi.
After a few weeks, he would be transferred to Louisiana, a state that for thousands of migrants has become synonymous with prolonged detention. He remained jailed, though an initial screening found his asylum claim was credible.
In the last days of his administration, President Barack Obama revoked a policy known as “wet foot, dry foot” that had given thousands of Cubans a path to permanent residency in the U.S. and, eventually, to citizenship.
Under President Donald Trump, the U.S has restricted the grounds on which people can request asylum and pushed immigration court judges to process and deny asylum claims more quickly. It has also detained thousands of asylum seekers who previously might have been allowed to live and work in the U.S. while their cases were pending.
Those policy changes occurred after Hernandez left
Cuba for the last time, but they shaped the last months of his life.
Last June 13, Hernandez arrived at the Richwood Correctional Center. Located in Monroe, in the northeastern part of the state, Richwood is one of at least eight Louisiana prisons that converted into immigration detention centers during the Trump administration.
Looking to fill prisons emptied by criminal justice reform, rural Louisiana communities filled jail beds with asylum seekers and other migrants. At one point last year, Louisiana had about 8,000 migrants in detention, second only to Texas and up from about 2,000 migrants at the end of the Obama administration.
Louisiana also has become notorious for the broad denial of parole to migrants, particularly large populations of Cubans, Venezuelans, and people from South Asia. A federal judge in September ruled that ICE’s New Orleans field office was violating the agency’s own guidelines by failing to give each migrant a case-by-case determination of whether they could be released.
Little changed immediately after that ruling, but there has been some improvement since. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, of 345 requests between Oct. 17 and Dec. 10, just four were granted. ICE granted parole to approximately 20 percent of asylum seekers in January and February, the ACLU of Louisiana said, citing data ICE has provided in the federal lawsuit.
ICE spokesman Bryan Cox declined to comment on parole practices in the state but said that “any suggestion that the majority of persons arrested by ICE are detained is false.”
The detainees at Richwood and other detention centers have repeatedly protested.
At one Louisiana jail, men from South Asia have staged a hunger strike lasting 100 days and counting. At another, officials pepper sprayed migrants who participated in a sit-in to demand freedom.
Wrote one Richwood inmate last year, in a letter released by the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants: “We only want our liberty to pursue our cases freely and to leave this hell, because Louisiana is a cemetery of living men.”
Speaking by phone from Havana, a man who was detained at Richwood recalls a time he saw Hernandez standing in the yard.
Hernandez was doubled over and clutching his stomach. His face was pallid. He had accidentally eaten something with sugar in it, which had aggravated his condition.
According to the now-deported detainee, Dariel Hevia Leon, Hernandez constantly complained of the pain and felt medical staff was not treating him properly.
“He told me that ‘the jail was killing me,’” Hevia said.
According to an ICE report compiled after his death, Hernandez was seen by medical staff when he arrived at Richwood and confirmed to have irritable bowel syndrome.
Yarelis Gutierrez says he had been diagnosed with intestinal problems in Peru and had needed medical help in Panama and Mexico during their journey.
People with IBS can control their pain with medication and diet. The syndrome also has been associated with anxiety and depression.
“I think they let him die.” — Yarelis Gutierrez Barrios, partner