Fernando Sabonger Garcia ended up in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on July 7 after being arrested at the Texas border. A Honduran national fleeing dangers at home, he was hoping for safe harbor in the United States. Instead, the 50-year-old ended up at Joe Corley Detention Facility, a privately run immigration detention center in Conroe, Texas.
By July, the Houston area was already a COVID-19 hotspot with 50,000 cases and 500 deaths. At Corley, all detainees faced danger of infection inside group quarters that held bunks for as many as 30 men, according to La O. Muñoz, a Cuban physician who was detained there and became a whistleblower after his release. “We almost slept head to head, coughing on top of each other,” Muñoz told the Houston Chronicle. Another man, a Mexican national detained in the same facility but in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, had already died of COVID-19. Soon Sabonger Garcia was transported to a hospital where he died on August 28.
Across the United States, deaths in immigration detention centers skyrocketed in 2020 to the highest rate of fatalities reported by ICE officials in more than a dozen years, according to a new report on in-custody deaths of immigrants by researchers at the University of Southern California’s medical school.
