On Wednesday, a civil rights advocacy group submitted a complaint to federal and county officials on behalf of an HIV-positive immigrant who went untreated for serious medical problems while he was held in a New Jersey detention center for 17 months.
In its complaint, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) wrote that its client, John Doe — a man originally from the Dominican Republic who was held at the Hudson County Correctional Facility between November 2014 and April 2016 — had lived with HIV for years before his detention. Once he was detained, Doe complained of serious medical problems because of his compromised immune system and faced significant delays in treatment and diagnosis. Neither the facility nor the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency immediately responded to his initial complaint. Seventeen months later, he finally received the first step in his cancer treatment.
The complaint alleged that, in January 2015, Doe complained of pain in his anus, which medical staff diagnosed as hemorrhoids. But the staff did not follow up or rule out other illnesses related to his symptoms. For the following year, the complaint alleged, Doe had pain in his rectum, anus, and back, among other various issues.
“He did see a HIV specialist periodically throughout his time there, from what we can tell,” Maureen Belluscio, a staff attorney for the Disability Justice Program at NYLPI, who represents Doe, told ThinkProgress in a phone interview on Wednesday. “They gave him medication, but when he complained of these symptoms, in our opinion, he was not given adequate attention.”
Doe had an annual physical exam in November 2015, while still in detention. Medical staff examined his anus and rectum. The complaint alleged that it was only in January 2016, “approximately one full year after Mr. Doe’s initial complaint,” that the facility sent him to a hospital for an outside consult. The open letter further said Doe received a surgical procedure called a Mediport, or “a medical device that functions as an artificial vein that is implanted under the skin and allows the patient to receive chemotherapy,” in April 2016.
Mediports carry a risk of infection and require continued care by a physician. The hospital scheduled him for a follow-up visit on April 19, 2016, but ICE released him from detention on April 12, 2016, without any discharge plans to continue his care or any information to maintain the Mediport in his body. Once released, two separate hospitals in New York could not treat him because he did not get medical records from ICE at Hudson County Correctional. He finally received his medical records and further treatment when lawyers stepped in to help him.
Doe’s experience with the medical care system at Hudson County is not an isolated incident. In July 2017, a Honduran-born immigrant died at the facility as a result of poor medical care. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General also issued a report in December 2017 which found problems with detainee care and basic hygiene at Hudson County.
During a recent visit to the Hudson detention facility, Marinda van Dalen — a senior staff attorney for the Health Justice Program at NYLPI who also represented Doe — heard similar issues from other detainees. One detainee with a cornea transplant was reportedly denied medication and only got to see a doctor “because by coincidence, he was scheduled to appear at the Varick Street ICE facility and there, he saw a doctor who recognized that it was in fact a medical emergency and arranged for him to go to the emergency room,” Van Dalen said. She said that the facility has also failed to properly monitor the medication level and blood of another detainee on an anti-convulsant medication.
“We have been representing and interviewing people in immigration detention for the last 2.5 years years and Mr. Doe’s situation is really reflective of what we have seen,” Laura Redman, one of Doe’s representatives and the director at the Health Justice Program at NYLPI, told ThinkProgress. “They’re being delayed in diagnosis, denial in certain treatments, misdiagnoses, not really addressing the underlying issues, not addressing complaints about pain.”
Doe’s problems are concerning because they reflect a systemic problem within detention centers affiliated with ICE. In 2017 alone, 12 detainees died in various ICE-affiliated detention centers across the United States, making it the deadliest year to be an immigrant detainee since 2009.
There have been numerous other complaints lobbed against immigration detention facilities, outside of the ones in Hudson County. Negligence, as well as sexual and physical abuse are so common that there were a total of 33,126 complaints filed against the DHS component agencies between January 2010 and July 2016. A 2017 NYLPI report found “serious deficiencies in the medical care provided to people in immigration detention,” and in interviews with 47 people with serious health conditions between May 2015 and November 2016, NYLPI lawyers found a variety of troubling issues, including incomplete intake assessments, denial of continued treatment, language access barriers, failure to manage chronic illnesses, and lengthy delays in receiving medical treatment, among other things.