Legal groups call for federal, state investigations into suicide at ICE detention center

Three California legal service agencies are calling on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate the death of a 74-year-old man with a documented history of mental illness who died by suicide while in medical isolation at a federal immigration detention center in Bakersfield.

Charging the state has the authority to regulate detention facilities within its borders, the organizations are also calling on Attorney General Xavier Becerra to investigate the death of Choung Woohn Ahn at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center, which is owned and operated by The GEO Group; investigate the health and safety of detention centers like Mesa Verde; and hold contractors like GEO civilly and criminally liable for actions that violate the terms of their federal contracts.

"ICE and GEO repeatedly violated their own standards — that they wrote — leading to Mr. Ahn's death," said Trevor Kosmo, a staff attorney with Oakland-based legal services agency Centro Legal de la Raza, one of the organizations filing the complaint. "The state of California cannot wait on the federal government to act. We need the state to act and hold GEO Group accountable."

The complaint to Homeland Security charges that ICE and GEO failed to provide Ahn with adequate and timely medical care and mental health treatment along with a host of other problems, violating the Constitution, federal disability law and binding detention center standards and "ultimately causing his death."

Centro Legal de la Raza, along with Disability Rights California, a legal services organization that investigates and litigates alleged violations of the rights of Californians with disabilities; and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, a coalition of pro-bono legal service providers that supports detained immigrants; filed the complaint with Homeland Security and Becerra's office on Thursday.

ICE spokesperson Jonathan Moor said the agency cannot comment on the complaint due to "ongoing litigation." He added: "However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement with or stipulation to any of the allegations."

The GEO Group declined to comment on the complaint, according to a company spokesperson.

The Attorney General is unable comment on a potential or ongoing investigation "to protect its integrity," a spokesperson said, and directed further comments to Homeland Security.

Homeland Security has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Attorney: 'No medical reason' to isolate Ahn

The complaint is based on Ahn’s clinical and detention records from Mesa Verde, medical files and incident reports from the Bakersfield Police Department, as well as interviews with 16 witnesses who interacted with Ahn in the days and weeks leading up to his death. It draws on these records to paint the picture of an older man with a documented history of suicide attempts as well as chronic health conditions whose death, the organizations say, was preventable.

Ahn was born in South Korea and admitted into the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident in 1988. But his status in the country was jeopardized after a 2011 domestic dispute.

He pleaded no contest in 2013 to attempted murder with an enhancement for using a firearm and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After serving a sentence of less than nine years, he was released from Solano State Prison in Vacaville last February. ICE immediately arrested him and detained him at Mesa Verde while he awaited deportation proceedings.

The pandemic hit California soon after and attorneys, worried the virus could tear through the detention center’s close quarters, advocated for releasing Ahn and other medically vulnerable immigrants. They argued Ahn should be released on bail due to his age and history of hypertension, type 2 diabetes and severe heart-related issues, including a recent heart attack, among other health problems.

But ICE pushed back and a federal judge denied Ahn’s bail.

Ahn’s physical and mental health deteriorated in detention. Over his three months at Mesa Verde, medical providers diagnosed Ahn with "unspecified depressive disorder" and documented his history of suicide attempts, according to ICE's public report of his death, which is mandated by Congress.

Ahn’s condition became more urgent after staff placed him in an isolation unit — "ostensibly for purposes of medical quarantine, even though he tested negative for COVID-19" — following a stay at a local hospital for chest pain, the complaint says.

Kosmo of Centro Legal alleges there "was no medical reason" for staff to isolate Ahn, and doing so, "cannot be squared" with the facility's COVID-19 protocols at that time.

"At the same time that they claimed Mr. Ahn had to be held in medical isolation, despite testing negative for COVID, they were regularly accepting incoming transfers from big prisons with confirmed large outbreaks of COVID-19, without testing those people or quarantining them in medical isolation," Kosmo said.

Isolation came with known risks, too. Medical studies have documented how solitary confinement is associated with both physical and mental health problems — a fact that Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General acknowledged in a July 2020 report, writing: “Proper monitoring of detainees in segregation is particularly critical given that research has found segregation can have damaging psychological effects and is an established risk factor for suicide.”

Yet reports conducted by the state and federal government have detailed inappropriate segregation practices at private immigration detention centers.

A September 2020 report conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security, for example, found that detention centers misuse segregation “as a form of threat or retaliation to assert control and gain compliance.” It called on the Government Accountability Office to conduct a review of ICE’s use of segregation.

The state Attorney General's 2021 report on immigration detention in California also identified the "overuse and overly restrictive nature of restrictive housing units for disciplinary and administrative segregation" as a "systemic issue" at Mesa Verde, as well as the private immigration facilities in Adelanto and Calexico. All three facilities housed detainees with serious mental health conditions in restrictive housing units, it said, "despite the isolation of segregation worsening the detainees' conditions."

Such reports didn't protect Ahn.

The day before Ahn's death, a clinical and forensic psychologist visited him in isolation and noted that he was having trouble sleeping and reported feeling sad, low energy and bored alone in his room. The doctor determined Ahn appeared to be "high suicidal risk if deported," according to records provided to The Desert Sun by attorneys that were advocating for his release from custody.

The next day, another provider described his mental health as "severe" and wrote: "Reported high risk of suicide if deported," the records show.

Ahn likely perceived his deportation as imminent, Kosmo said — his hearing to defend or contest his immigration charges was scheduled for two days later and he didn’t have an immigration attorney representing him in his deportation case.

ICE standards require detainees identified as at risk for suicide or self-harm to be referred to a mental health provider, and to place the detainee on constant, one-to-one monitoring until that evaluation occurs. The monitoring must be documented every 15 minutes or more frequently, they say.

Despite the reports that Ahn appeared to be at high risk for suicide if deported, he was not on suicide watch and doesn't appear to received constant monitoring on the night of his death, according to the Bakersfield Police incident report.

On the evening of May 17, GEO guards were instructed to check on Ahn every 15 minutes, the report said. Its description of the surveillance footage details how, after one guard checked on him, 17 minutes elapsed before another knocked on his door multiple times, then opened it and found him dead in the shower.

“Despite his known mental health issues, despite ICE knowing that he was somebody who was in a very vulnerable state, they stuck him into solitary confinement — knowing that that exacerbates existing mental health issues, knowing the negative effect that that has on anyone —  and they failed to monitor him,” said Lisa Knox, legal director for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. “There are all sorts of rules and regulations that are designed to protect people from that exact situation.”

Complaint: Solitary confinement was 'death sentence'

ICE and GEO violated both Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which protects people from discrimination based on their disability, as well as Ahn’s Constitutional rights, when they placed him in medical isolation, the compliant alleges.

"For Mr. Ahn, solitary confinement was punitive — indeed, a death sentence," it says. "ICE and GEO exposed Mr. Ahn to a high risk of harm by intentionally placing him in conditions of extreme isolation and deprivation, despite knowing that it would exacerbate his pre-existing mental illness — while also failing to provide him adequate mental health treatment or properly monitor him." 

The complaint also charges that ICE and GEO violated ICE detention standards by “failing to provide timely and adequate mental health treatment; failing to provide timely and adequate medical care; failing to follow proper screening protocols; failing to adequately assess risk of self-harm; failing to abide by medical housing standards; and failing to implement suicide prevention standards.”

It alleges that Ahn’s death represents a systemic problem: “ICE and their contractors have routinely abused medical isolation, disproportionately harming the most vulnerable detainees — such as people with disabilities and Black migrants — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The organizations leading the complaint also shared the document with Becerra's office and urged him to "take any enforcement actions that are within your authority."

"Your office is uniquely situated to take these actions because previous [Office of Inspector General/Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties] audits have been insufficient," they wrote. "In order to protect the lives and well-being of detained individuals, we need a concerted effort to hold ICE and their contractors accountable."

Kosmo of Centro Legal made a more direct plea.

"How many more people need to die before the AG will do something?" he said.

Rebecca Plevin reports on immigration for The Desert Sun. Reach her at rebecca.plevin@desertsun.com. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaplevin.