Here is what we know about the ICE detainee who collapsed at Morrow County Correctional Facility (MCCF) on September 12, 2020.
A man arrested by ICE was brought in to MCCF on or before September 11th, 2020. He was not isolated or tested for COVID-19. He was put into general population. (We are withholding his name to protect his privacy. We will call him John.)
On September 11th (Friday), John began to have difficulty breathing. He reported distress to the Corrections Officers, but no help was provided. All night he lay listless, clearly in need of medical attention.
MCCF has a nurse in the facility from 6am-2pm on weekdays only. After 2pm on weekdays and throughout the entire weekend, there are no medical personnel at the jail. Anthony Khoury is the doctor who is supposed to provide health care at the jail, but he has rarely, if ever, been seen at the facility by any detainee.
On September 12th (Saturday), just before lunch, John collapsed in the lunchroom. He was bleeding and had stopped breathing. Another ICE detainee attempted to perform CPR; the Corrections Officers did not. There was no medical personnel on site.
The 911 calls.
In this first call, at 1:08pm on 9/12, a jail staffer tells the 911 dispatcher that John was not breathing, had a seizure, and bit his tongue. She says someone did CPR “for about two seconds” and she thinks he started breathing after that. The dispatcher asks if he has COVID and the jail staffer says no.
In the second call, at 1:11pm on 9/12, the jail states that because John is an ICE inmate, she doesn’t know “how much information we even have on him, as far as age or anything like that, I have no idea.”
Since the jail did not test John for COVID, they made a misrepresentation to the 911 operator regarding his COVID status.
Also, the fact that the jail might not know anything about him is truly appalling. Although he is an ICE detainee, he is still physically in MCCF care. When he entered the jail they should have done an intake and gathered this information. We do know, however, that MCCF does not use interpreters in the booking process or medical conversations. That is not an excuse for the jail to know nothing about John, but it could be a reason. Either way, MCCF should not be allowed to have people in their custody without knowing who they are and how to contact loved ones in an emergency.
This could have been prevented if the jail and county leadership had only listened.
I spoke to Morrow County Prosecutor Charles Howland on Monday, September 14. He told me he was not aware of this incident. He also told me that Morrow County is doing the best they can, but they can only deal with the “facts on hand.”
I asked him if he had read the Order issued by U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison in the ACLU of Ohio case regarding conditions at MCCF that violate ICE detainees’ rights, such as the lack of medical care. He had not. That order contains a lot of facts that the Morrow County Sheriff, Commissioners, and Prosecutor should have been well aware of, and been working to correct. Here is an excerpt:
[After indicating that someone infected with COVID may have a time-sensitive “need for the escalation of care… because symptoms can quickly take a turn for the worse and require care within as little as thirty minutes.”] Morrow has shown that it is not up to this task. It has no medical staff onsite from 10:00 PM until 6:00 AM every weeknight and no medical staff onsite for fifty-six consecutive hours from Friday at 10:00 PM until Monday at 6:00 AM. While there is always a nurse on call, a nurse who is not onsite cannot provide direct medical monitoring. Instead, detainees must contact the guards who must contact the nurses who must then either travel to the facility or make an assessment without a firsthand examination. The time lag that is inherent in this medical relay race can jeopardize the safety of a detainee whose health rapidly declines during off-hours…. The evidence also shows that even when they are onsite, the nurses have little if any direct contact with the infected detainees. It is thus difficult to understand how nurses can properly monitor detainees with whom they rarely interact.
This was written by a Trump-appointed judge. At the time this order was written, there were two nurses on staff at MCCF. Currently, there is only one, hence the reduced hours.
But willful ignorance is not bliss, though it may be blinding. The fact is, Morrow leadership were warned this could happen, and did nothing.
And here is what we know still do not know.
What happened after Emergency Medical Services arrived. Where was he taken? Where is he now?
Whether his family was notified. If MCCF did not even know his age or name, it seems unlikely they notified his family of his illness. Did ICE? When?
Whether John is OK now. He appears to be rostered at another jail, still under ICE custody. But we do not know what medical problems he continues to have, what care he needs, and whether he is getting it.
And, why no one in Morrow County listened to Federal Judge Sarah D. Morrison when she warned this would happen.
We demand answers. We demand accountability from MCCF and Sheriff John Hinton; Prosecutor Charles Howland; Commissioners Thomas Whiston, Burgess Castle, and Warren Davis; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.