On the last day of his life, Efrain de la Rosa, a 40-year old Mexican citizen detained as an undocumented immigrant, told a social worker he didn’t need medication for his schizophrenia. He would die soon, he said. Later that day, De la Rosa knotted together his prison-issue orange socks, fashioned them into a noose, and hanged himself from the top bunk in his solitary confinement cell at Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center.
De la Rosa spent four months at Stewart, which is operated by the private prison firm CoreCivic. While incarcerated, he repeatedly predicted his own death, reported hearing voices, and refused medication. He was briefly placed on suicide watch and was sent to an outside mental health facility for five weeks. Upon his return to Stewart, he continued to refuse medication and to dwell on death in his conversations with healthcare staff and detainees.
Stewart is indistinguishable from a prison even though the detainees are held only to compel their attendance at immigration hearings or to await deportation there, and not as punishment. At the time of his July 10, 2018, death, De la Rosa had been alone in a 13-by-6-foot cell 23 hours a day for three weeks. It was his second stint in solitary confinement.
De la Rosa’s suicide came just 14 months after that of JeanCarlo Jimenez Joseph, a 27-year-old man who was also mentally ill and hanged himself after 19 days in solitary confinement. He was the 184th detainee to die in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2003, and the third to die at Stewart since May 2017.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no criminal wrongdoing in De la Rosa’s death, but its report, which includes findings from the detention center’s internal investigation, along with ICE’s detention death report, shows that Stewart Detention Center staff made a series of mistakes in De la Rosa’s care, beginning with his placement in solitary confinement and ending with a chaotic emergency response when he was found unresponsive in his cell.
The report shows that detention center staff repeated some of the same errors in De la Rosa’s care that they made in Jimenez Joseph’s. The failure to correct such mistakes–which can prove fatal to vulnerable detainees–is common in ICE detention centers, concluded a Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report entitled, “ICE’s Inspections and Monitoring of Detention Facilities Do Not Lead to Sustained Compliance.” “ICE does not adequately follow up on identified deficiencies or consistently hold facilities accountable,” inspectors found.
Private prison firm sought to suppress the report
In De la Rosa’s case, CoreCivic made an attempt to suppress the release of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) report, which exposes some of those errors, arguing that making it available to the public would violate federal law.
