Homeland Security report on immigrant detainee deaths highlights St. Paul case

A report released on Tuesday by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security looks at the deaths of detainees being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the lens of two particular cases. One of the spotlighted deaths occurred in St. Paul in April 2006, when a department store worker named Maria Inamagua Merchan died in the hospital after a lengthy detention at the Ramsey County jail. It emerged that Inamagua, who was only 26, had advanced neurocysticercosis, an infection of the brain by larvae of the pork tapeworm, and had been complaining of headaches that medication didn’t relieve for some time. She finally was taken to the hospital only after collapsing and hitting her head.

The inspector general’s report finds little fault with ICE in either of the deaths; the report’s main recommendation is that ICE do a better job of reporting detainee deaths, as the NYT noted today. The full report, meanwhile, is in this PDF.

Little is publicly known about Inamagua, whose name does not even appear in the DHS IG report, but a 2006 request for investigation written to the DHS inspector general from the Ecuadoran Civic Committee of Minnesota (and posted at the CUAPB site) contained this footnote:

"Nine years ago, Maria Inamagua crossed the U.S.-Mexican border without authorization to join family members in the Twin Cities, a mix of documented residents, including permanent residents and U.S. citizens. She held a series of cleaning, food service and maintenance jobs and at the time of her arrest was employed at a department-store restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. Seven years ago, Maria married Patricio Flores and they have a six-year-old daughter, Joanna. Soon after her arrival here, according to relatives, she was cited for illegally distributing fliers in mail boxes and the ensuing court summons found its way to federal immigration agents. Deportation proceedings were commenced and when she failed to meet a voluntary deportation deadline, a warrant was issued in 1998, according to Tim Counts, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Office in Bloomington, Minnesota."