Why Did a 75-Year-Old Man in Poor Health Just Die in ICE Custody?

In a notification sent to Congress over the weekend, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement revealed that a 75-year-old Cuban national named Isidro Perez died while in ICE custody on June 26. The death, which appears to have been caused by a heart attack, is “still under investigation,” according to the notification, which was sent our way by a congressional aide.

Obviously, the man’s age immediately makes it look odd that he was in ICE detention in the first place. But here’s something else that’s striking about this case: According to the ICE note, the man was first paroled into the United States in 1966.

Yes, you read that right. The man has been here for almost 60 years—and he appears to have been around 16 years old when he first arrived from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Whatever is learned about the death, those details are going to raise serious questions about the deployment of law enforcement resources under Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s dragnet. Miller has been ordering ICE officials to drive up the deportation numbers to the highest possible levels, and detaining a 75-year-old man who has been here for longer than a half-century is apparently what this has come to entail.

So why was he detained? The ICE note to Congress claims that he was arrested in a law enforcement operation in Key Largo on June 6, and was “charged with inadmissibility pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act,” or INA. It notes that he was paroled into the United States on April 1, 1966, in Houston.

Perez was also convicted of possession of a controlled substance twice, in 1981 and 1984. While it’s hard to know what that means absent more details, the upshot of this is that the drug charges appear minor, he likely served whatever his sentences were, and both occurred more than 40 years ago.

Perez appears to be the twelfth person to die in ICE custody this fiscal year, an increase over previous years. According to the notification, he was in detention at the Krome detention center in Miami, which is already coming under scrutiny, after two deaths there this year. Krome is where migrants recently lined up to spell out “S.O.S.” in the yard, highlighting growing concerns about detention conditions.

Perez reported chest pains, leading to the summoning of paramedics, who attempted to resuscitate him, after which he died at a Florida hospital, the notification says. While there’s no reason to assume as of now that Perez’s death was directly due to mishandling by ICE, its notification says he’d been diagnosed upon getting booked into Krome and then transferred temporarily to that hospital during his detention, so ICE knew he faced serious health risks.

Immigration law experts tell me they think that given his 1966 arrival in the United States, Perez was likely paroled into the U.S. as part of the parole programs that the U.S. implemented for Cubans fleeing Castro’s reign.

ICE’s determination of Perez’s inadmissibility under the INA, a law passed in the early 1950s, also suggests that his drug convictions may be the basis for his attempted deportation, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

But again, these happened more than four decades ago. And whatever is subsequently learned about Perez, questions will surely be raised about why someone of this age—who had been paroled into the U.S. as a teenager before Americans set foot on the moon—was detained in the first place.

“Not only is it unjust and unnecessary to execute a deportation order from two generations in the past, but when the target is an elderly person with health issues, detention is particularly dangerous,” Reichlin-Melnick told me.

“As part of their deportation drive, are they going to start reconsidering more people paroled into this country 50 years ago?” asked Yael Schacher, an advocate with Refugees International, adding that in no sense was Perez any kind of “flight risk.”

This will also raise new questions about the major story unfolding in the background: the deeply questionable use of law enforcement resources to pump up deportation numbers. As it is, Miller is already allocating massive numbers of law enforcement agents into his removals in ways that are shifting them away from the pursuit of other more serious crimes.

Miller recently berated ICE officials for lagging deportation numbers, demanding that they round up more migrants in Home Depot parking lots, which by definition targets people who are merely here to work. And The Washington Post reports that to prosecute the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia for smuggling migrants, the Trump administration is releasing from prison a three-time felon who “drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community,” sparing him deportation to secure his cooperation as a witness.

That move literally releases into the United States a far more serious and dangerous criminal to target a far less serious offender, simply because Trump and Miller insist Abrego Garcia must be convicted of something, to sustain their propaganda narrative that all migrants are criminals.

Making all this even uglier, Trump is expected to visit “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new and already notorious detention center now open in the Florida Everglades. In short, Trump and Miller are actively flaunting their detention regime and its cruelties and renditions, as part of their effort to spread terror among immigrants, getting them to self-deport.

In that regard, the death of Perez also highlights another deeply unsettling fact: If Trump gets his new budget bill passed, it will allocate tens of billions of additional dollars for detentions and deportations. That will lead to dramatically ramped-up detentions under worsening conditions—and probably more deaths. In this, Perez is a harbinger of much, much worse to come.