Immigrants in ICE detention at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. (Photo credit: ICE)
Until late last year, Daniel Cortes De La Valle had not stepped foot in his native Colombia since 1998. His mother moved him and his brother to Florida when he was eight after his family had faced drug cartel violence.
But when he voluntarily accepted deportation in October 2023, he wasn’t afraid to return. What scared him, he said in a recent interview, was the prospect of dying inside a Louisiana immigration detention center.
Cortes De La Valle has epilepsy, which qualifies him as having a disability under federal law, making him eligible for special accommodations in detention.
But according to Cortes De La Valle, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention staff at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, where he was held for nearly a year, did not provide those accommodations. During his detention, detention staff repeatedly endangered his life, repeatedly assigning him to an upper bunk despite the risk of falls during a seizure, he claimed.
“I grew fear of what happens if I have a seizure,” Cortes De La Valle said in an interview last month, connecting via Zoom from Bogotá. “They don’t care if I die.”
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He said when he spoke up about the bunk assignments detention staff accused him of faking his seizures. He said housing problems were just the tip of an iceberg that included verbal taunts from detention staff, alleged abuses during two hospital visits and isolation and neglect after numerous seizures.
Cortes De La Valle, who was undocumented for most of his time in the U.S., was on track to getting his green card, which would have allowed him to stay in the country legally on a permanent basis. He could have stayed to fight his case in immigration court. But, he said, it wasn’t worth it.
“I told myself, ‘I gotta get out of here,’” he said.
In September of this year, nearly 10 months after he was deported, Cortes De La Valle felt vindicated when federal authorities affirmed that ICE and the facility where he was held had indeed violated his civil rights. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Liberties, or CRCL, had responded in a letter to alerts from his attorney that he had been denied accommodations he was entitled to by law.
“ICE and its contractor discriminated against Complainant,” the letter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties said.
A spokesperson for the GEO Group — the private prison company that operates the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center where Cortes De La Valle was detained — said in an emailed statement that the company cannot comment on specific immigration cases, but noted that the federal government is responsible for health care services at the facility.
The GEO Group has a “zero-tolerance policy with respect to staff misconduct and discrimination,” the spokesperson added “Any such instances are investigated and addressed appropriately in accordance with GEO policy and those of our client.”
CRCL’s finding in Cortes De La Valle’s case is just one of a series of proven or alleged civil rights violations against people with disabilities in immigration detention to come to light in Louisiana and nationwide.
Last month, civil rights attorneys filed a lawsuit against DHS and ICE officials for denying a woman with physical and mental disabilities the accommodation of release from another GEO-run facility in Louisiana. At the time, experts told Verite News that such problems exist across the immigration detention system. A recent report from the DHS Office of Inspector General, released in September, found that 17 ICE detention centers failed to comply with federal immigration detention standards in multiple areas, including chronic medical care and medical staffing.
“I felt, in a way, a sort of relief that somebody actually looked at it,” Cortes De La Valle said. “It’s something that people see.”
After arrest, a difficult year in detention
Cortes De La Valle said he was on the verge of being approved for legal permanent residency when his immigration troubles began.
In December 2020 he married a U.S. citizen with whom he would have a son. He has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship. He said he had applied for a green card, but the bureaucratic chaos from the Covid-19 pandemic had slowed processing times.
In July 2022, Cortes De La Valle was in Pensacola, Florida, for work – he designs stage lighting for large events – when he went to a restaurant and drank too much. He was asked to leave but refused. The police were called to arrest him for trespassing.
He had always struggled with alcohol – he’d previously been convicted twice in Florida for driving while intoxicated – but he said his drinking had ramped up in the years after his older brother was killed in a traffic accident in 2019 and his mother died of colon cancer in 2020. He said around that time, he started having seizures. He’d begun seeking medical help, but hadn’t been formally diagnosed with epilepsy.
Cortes De La Valle said he had a seizure during his arrest, lost control of his body and grabbed an officer’s ankle. Inside an ambulance, Cortes De La Valle, still seizing, spat on an emergency medical technician, he said.
He was later convicted of trespassing, corrupt moral decency and battery of an officer, which federal immigration officials would later cite as a reason to keep him locked up pending the outcome of his immigration case.
ICE located Daniel through its database that identifies people booked into local jails who are legally eligible for deportation proceedings. He was transferred from a local jail to the processing center in Jena in December 2022. When he got there, he told ICE Health Services Corps staff that he suffered from seizures.
I told myself, ‘I gotta get out of here.’
– Daniel Cortes De La Valle
By March 2023, civil rights attorneys had filed a complaint on his behalf alleging that he’d had two traumatic hospital visits following seizures – in one, he’d been restrained to a bed for five days and was forced to relieve himself where he lay. He alleged that a hospital technician sexually assaulted him by cleaning his intimate areas against his will. During another hospital visit, he’d undergone a painful procedure in which medical staff created an IV line by drilling into a bone in his leg, which the complaint alleged was potentially unnecessary and possibly abuse.
After a news report about the complaint was published, he said he was taunted by staff at the facility. When he pushed back, he said, the guards told him to file another complaint or talk to the media. Cortes De La Valle started having seizures nearly every day, his attorney, Sarah Decker told Verite News.
Decker, a staff attorney at civil rights nonprofit RFK Human Rights, said when Cortes De La Valle had a seizure, he would be placed in a segregation unit with nothing more than a mattress on the floor.
In July 2023, RFK attorneys sent an email to federal oversight officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including CRCL, about Cortes De La Valle’s experiences.
“Daniel is being subjected to acute threats to his life, including severe daily seizures, head trauma, and multiple (3) suicide attempts in the past week,” the attorneys wrote. “ICE and its contractors at CLIPC have responded to Daniel’s medical crises by retaliating against him, physically abusing him, and placing him in a punitive solitary confinement cell that is in egregious condition and is infested with biting ants.”
In September, Decker began emailing CRCL and the local ICE office about Cortes De La Valle’s bunk assignments. ICE officials told her she was mistaken, but she believed he was telling her the truth – that he’d been transferred out of the medical unit and gotten a new bed assignment for an upper bunk.
“I was afraid to go to the hospitals. I was afraid to see medical. I was afraid to talk to the staff. I was afraid they’re gonna retaliate. I was afraid I’m gonna have a seizure and die,” Cortes De La Valle said of his last months in detention.
In October, Cortes De La Valle decided to stop fighting his immigration case and agreed to go back to Colombia. He was deported on Dec. 5, 2023.
ICE says it will ‘comply with the remedy’
Then, in September 2024, Decker received the letter from CRCL, affirming his civil rights had been violated. Officials said the upper bunk assignments had gone against Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make “reasonable accommodations” for people with disabilities.
“Complainant’s seizure disorder puts him at risk of serious bodily harm, or worse, when placed in an upper bunk during waking and sleeping hours,” the letter read.
Decker is part of a coalition of attorneys and advocates who regularly visit immigration detention facilities in Louisiana.
She said she and her colleagues have encountered “handfuls” of people each visit who she said ICE has not designated for disability accommodations, but who experts, after reviewing their medical records, identify as having mental or physical disabilities. She said some detainees who are recognized as having disabilities under federal law are still not receiving the appropriate treatment or accommodations.
“It is impossible to know what [ICE considers] to be a disability,” Decker said. “I think their definition is extraordinarily narrow and doesn’t actually comply with the federal definition and I don’t think their recordkeeping, if it exists, would even be accurate.”
“Your likelihood of getting the care you’re entitled to under federal law is basically nonexistent,” she said.
ICE does not have readily available comprehensive data on how many people with disabilities are in its custody. A semi-annual report from the agency said that ICE had placed at least 414 people considered “special” or “vulnerable” into segregated housing during the third quarter of 2024. However, the terms “special” and “vulnerable” are not limited to people with federally recognized disabilities.
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In a 2023 report to federal lawmakers, CRCL shared details from two cases in which it found ICE had violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In one case, a woman with hearing loss detained in Basile, Louisiana was denied a hearing aid. In the second case, whereCRCL did not name the facility, an ICE detainee with a mental disability was wrongfully placed in segregation – a reportedly frequent practice.
“There’s countless instances of people with mental health disabilities, especially, being placed in solitary confinement, which, is so well studied and well documented, causes extreme deterioration of someone’s mental health,” Decker said.
In an emailed statement, Tamara Spicer, a spokesperson for ICE, said ICE is “firmly committed to the health, safety, and welfare of all those in its custody and will comply with the remedy in the determination letter.”
‘It cost me a lot’
The letter from CRCL about Cortes De La Valle recommended that ICE train the “appropriate personnel” at the facility on the protocol for providing bottom bunk accommodations and renewing and documenting those accommodations.
Cortes De La Valle said he believes he stayed alive in detention because other immigrants looked out for him – they offered to trade beds and watched out for him when he used the bathroom or took a shower in case he had a seizure.
“I’d been in that country for over 25 years. I paid taxes,” he said. “I did all the right stuff and then they made it seem that I was faking my condition to try to get released from detention.”
In Bogotá, where Cortes De La Valle now lives, he has seen a neurologist and been formally diagnosed with frontal lobe epilepsy. He said he’s “learning how to be a Colombian citizen.” By the time he arrived in Colombia, he had given all of his savings to his wife and son, because he’d had no way of earning for the year and a half that he was in jail and immigration detention. Once deported, his marriage quickly fell apart.
“It cost me a lot,” Cortes De La Valle said of detention and deportation. “I could have helped my family out, I could have saved my family, I could have saved my investments.”
He said he’s got a new girlfriend and he doesn’t drink at all anymore. His relationships with his children are now strained. But he said he continues to save for their future. He said he regrets accepting deportation, but he feared he would never be able to provide for his family again had he died in detention.
“I have two children I need to care for,” he said. “If I’m dead I can’t do anything. If I go to Columbia, I can.”
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This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.