Carlos Josué Marchena, a 37-year-old Costa Rican man, died in ICE custody last Thursday or Friday at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, after many months in detention. Carlos was apparently taken into ICE custody in January after an arrest in Michigan, and moved through facilities in Michigan and California before he reached Winn, a converted state prison ICE runs through LaSalle Corrections. If confirmed, this would be the third death at the facility under this administration according to the ICE Detention Mortality dashboard, and the sixth since 2020. An unannounced inspection over the summer found a long list of deficiencies at the facility.
ICE has not yet confirmed this death publicly and English language media has been slow to pick up the story, but online reports from Spanish language outlets such as Conexión Migrant, Teletica, and others have been reporting on the story since Friday. His sister, Franciny Araya, told La Nación and other outlets that he had diabetes, and that medication and meals sometimes arrived late or not at all. Family members say he died of a heart attack. (Yet another good reason to make Spanish-language media part of your daily news diet.)
While I was out of the office, a previous custodial death came to light, that of Lianyong Wei who died in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, on August 23. ICE did not announce his death until September 1. Wei, a 51-year-old man from China, died about a day after ICE took him into custody at a territorial prison in Saipan. ICE’s press release, published nine days after the death, says a corrections officer found him unresponsive during morning checks on August 23 and that he was pronounced dead roughly 30 minutes later at a nearby hospital.
A federal civil rights committee had previously examined healthcare access at that same Commonwealth prison fourteen months before he died and found one full-time doctor, no full-time nurse, and no medically trained staff on site after 4:30 in the afternoon. Wei is, as far as I can tell, the first person to die in ICE detention in the Northern Mariana Islands under this or any administration, and illustrates the broad geographic scope of ICE’s enforcement reach beyond the territorial United States.