TACOMA — A person was declared dead Sunday morning at the privately-run federal immigration detention center in Tacoma, according to police and fire officials.
Few details about the person and the circumstances of their death were immediately available. It is the second death to occur at the Northwest ICE Processing Center this year. A group of local immigration activists were gathered Tuesday afternoon outside the facility on the Tideflats for a vigil.
Tacoma Fire Department personnel responded to the NWIPC, 1623 E. J St., at about 7:04 a.m. Sunday for a report of an unresponsive person who was breathing, according to spokesperson Chelsea Shepherd. She said she could not provide information about the sex or age of the individual. Shepherd said a radio traffic signal at 7:43 a.m. indicated that the person had died.
A Tacoma Police Department officer was also called to the facility for a medical-dispatch call. A TPD spokesperson, officer Shelbie Boyd, didn’t have any information about the circumstances of the death. She said a police report was not completed. The Pierce County Medical Examiner will determine the cause.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to requests for information. The GEO Group, the contractor that runs the facility, did not answer emailed questions and referred The News Tribune to ICE.
Maru Mora Villalpando is an organizer and founder of La Resistencia, a group that advocates for the closing of the facility and an end to deportations. She told The News Tribune that a detainee at the NWIPC told La Resistencia about the death on Tuesday, and that the person who died was a man who had been under medical obseration, which Mora Villalpando referred to as medical isolation.
Mora Villalpando said she and others with La Resistencia would be outside the detention center all day Tuesday. She said they had been planning a Day of the Dead event to honor the three people who have previously died at the NWIPC, and now they will have to add a fourth.
“We’re just very shocked,” Mora Villalpando said. “We knew this could happen, but to actually happen, nobody’s ready for such news.”
Charles Leo Daniel, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, died at the NWIPC on March 7. The medical examiner determined he died of hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The 61-year-old man spent 1,244 days in solitary confinement at the facility before his death. GEO Group officials said Daniel had requested to be housed alone.
Two other deaths have been reported at the facility since it opened in 2004, according to ICE records. In 2006, a 42-year-old man died of coronary artery disease. In 2018, a 40-year-old man held in solitary confinement died by suicide.
