A Cuban national who was being held at a federal immigration detention center in South Georgia died Tuesday night. Yulio Castro-Garrido, 33, is the third U.S. Immigration and Enforcement detainee to die since May after being held in Georgia.
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Authorities at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin diagnosed Castro-Garrido with pneumonia on Jan. 7 and took him to Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center in Cuthbert. He initially resisted medical treatment, which caused his condition to worsen, ICE said. Next, he was taken to Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, where he was placed on a ventilator. Then he was transported to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. He slipped into a coma there on Jan. 22 and never regained consciousness.
“ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive review of this incident, as it does in all such cases,” ICE said in a prepared statement. “This agency’s comprehensive review will be conducted by ICE senior leadership to include Enforcement and Removal Operations, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor.”
Christina Fialho, co-founder of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement, which wants to end immigration detention in this country, said: “ICE often says that people are resisting medical treatment but in reality the agency has time and time again failed to provide proper medical care."
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