Mergensana Amar, a 40-year-old Russian citizen, showed up at a legal checkpoint on the U.S.-Mexico border last year and pleaded for protection in the United States.
He spent the next year in immigration custody, fighting deportation. In August, he launched a hunger strike that nearly killed him. In October, his jailers in Tacoma, Washington, found a handmade rope under his bed and briefly placed him on suicide watch, according to federal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
On Nov. 15, he tried to hang himself and was placed on life support.
Amar died Saturday, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said this week. His death – the second involving a detainee in an ICE facility since Oct. 1 – comes as immigration advocates are raising questions about inmate safety and as the Trump administration is holding record numbers of immigrants in custody.
“Amar’s death is an example of the lengths that ICE will go to keep people in detention,” said Maru Mora Villalpando, a community organizer with NWDC Resistance, an organization that had tried to help Amar. “They could have released him and they decided not to. He kept telling us, ‘I’d rather die here than be deported.’ They cannot say they didn’t know, or they didn’t see it coming.”
Deaths in immigration jails plunged from 28 in 2004, under President George W. Bush, to six a decade later. But the count has slowly risen since then. Twelve immigrants died in ICE custody in fiscal 2017, according to agency records, and nine died last fiscal year. ICE officials say a 10th immigrant, who killed himself in Egypt while he was being deported to Eritrea, was in the custody of Egyptian officials when he took his own life.
At the same time, President Donald Trump is vowing to jail more immigrants who cross the border seeking asylum, frustrated that so many are released pending hearings in the country’s backlogged immigration courts.
There have been as many as 44,000 migrants in ICE jails in recent weeks, roughly 10,000 higher than the average under President Barack Obama. The surging numbers have exceeded ICE’s budget, prompting emergency cash infusions, including $55 million this month in a rare short-term apportionment from the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Homeland Security said.
Last weekend, Trump tweeted that “our very strong policy is Catch and Detain.”
ICE spokeswoman Tanya Roman said in a statement that the federal government would conduct “a thorough investigation” of Amar’s death “in order to affirm that ICE protocols were followed.” She said, “Amar remained in good physical health prior to this incident and was monitored daily by ICE Health Service Corps medical professionals.”
Amar arrived at the San Ysidro border checkpoint in California on Dec. 2. He was jailed at Northwest Detention Center, a private facility run by Geo Group, which manages 75,000 beds in 70 prisons and detention facilities nationwide, according to its website.
In interviews before his death, he told advocates and a reporter that he feared for his life in Russia because skinheads had beaten him and he’d been jailed for calling for independence for the Buryatia republic, the remote region in Siberia where he said he lived.
“I would prefer to die on this soil than go back to Russia,” Amar told Grace Meng, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, according to a report in Crosscut, an online news outlet in the Pacific Northwest.
An immigration judge denied Amar’s asylum claim on Aug. 7, and ordered him deported. Agency officials declined to say why he was jailed throughout the process.
Unlike criminal cases, immigration cases are not a matter of public record; more detailed information about Amar’s asylum hearing, including whether he had a lawyer, could not be found.
Amar launched his hunger strike in late August, skipping a month’s worth of meals and taking only sips of water, according to a petition that ICE filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma seeking permission to forcibly hydrate him to keep him alive. As the days passed, the filing states, Amar grew dizzy and weak and spent most of his time in bed.
U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle allowed the agency to give Amar intravenous fluids against his will, using soft restraints if necessary. ICE officials said Amar resumed eating fruit and shakes on Sept. 19.
On Oct. 1, Amar appealed his deportation order to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
But he was too late. The board dismissed the appeal as “untimely,” said court spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly, because it was filed after the 30-day deadline. Amar would have had to submit the appeal by Sept. 6, the same day ICE filed the court petition saying he was in danger of “imminent death.”
He was scheduled for deportation this month.
The day after his appeal was dismissed, Amar wrote a note in Russian to a lawyer who had visited him, according to a state court petition filed last week by immigration advocates who asked a judge to intervene on Amar’s behalf.
The note said his jailers had found a rope in his possession and placed him on suicide watch, taking away his clothes and placing him naked in a cold cell with a mattress, a sheet and a thin blanket.
Federal documents reviewed by The Post show the suicide watch lasted less than two days.
More than a week later, Amar tried to strangle himself in his cell, according to the medical examiner’s office.
A detainee in a nearby cell told advocates that Amar appeared unconscious when guards took him away and that his hands, feet and lips were purple.
ICE said Amar was in “voluntary protective custody,” apart from other detainees, when he hung himself. Officials would not say why he was taken off suicide watch. The Geo Group referred questions to ICE, and the Russian Embassy declined to comment.
Some advocates announced Amar’s death prematurely. He was declared brain dead at St. Joseph’s Medical Center on Nov. 18 and taken off life support Saturday. The cause of death was asphyxiation by hanging.
The case is the latest to draw concern about detainee care from advocates or government watchdogs in recent months.
After a 32-year-old man hanged himself last year at Adelanto Detention Facility in California, Homeland Security inspectors found “nooses” dangling from air vents during an unannounced inspection in May.
The facility, which is also run by Geo Group, had at least seven suicide attempts from December 2016 to October 2017.
In Florida, an ICE report found that a 37-year-old man killed himself last year after immigration agents left him unshackled and unsupervised at a local hospital, where he was receiving medical treatment.
And three men died over the past two years at Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, including a 33-year-old man who had pneumonia and two others with a history of mental illness who killed themselves. The most recent death was Efrain de la Rosa, who apparently hanged himself in July after being removed from suicide watch, according to documents reviewed by The Post.
Advocates in Washington state called for an independent investigation into Amar’s death, saying they do not want to rely on ICE’s internal review.
“Nobody’s safe in detention,” Villalpando said Wednesday. “Detention is made to break people’s spirit . . . We’re extremely worried about more people dying.”
The Washington Post’s Julie Tate in Washington, D.C., and Rodika Tollefson in Tacoma, Washington, contributed to this report.
