ICE is killing detained immigrants by denying them medical care.
Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was a forty-five-year-old Venezuelan man with a medical condition. Last Thursday, when ICE agents arrested him at his home in Dallas, Georgia, his family asked them to let him take his medication. ICE ignored them. Then they allowed him to take one. He was held at the Irwin County Detention Center, a privately run facility in Georgia with a documented history of medical abuse — the same facility where women were subjected to non-consensual gynecological procedures, the same facility whose contract was terminated by the Biden administration in 2021 after a whistleblower came forward. On Monday morning, while being transferred to another ICE facility, Arenas-Silva was found unresponsive on a transport bus. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital. The suspected cause of death was cardiac arrest. He is the 22nd person to die in ICE custody this year.
The Torah commands Israel thirty times to love the stranger, to remember being strangers in Egypt. You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. That commandment is not a suggestion. It is the moral memory of a people who were once the ones without power, the ones who could be denied, the ones who could die unnoticed. The United States has built a system that produces the exact opposite outcome: a detention apparatus whose predictable result is that people with medical conditions die because they are denied the medicine they need. The Irwin facility was known to be medically dangerous. Its contract was terminated. And then it was reopened, because the demand for detention beds outran the supply of facilities that could hold them. The administration knows what this facility is. They chose to use it anyway.
Twenty-two people have died in ICE custody this year. Last week, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by an ICE official in Texas. This week, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot and killed by ICE officials in Maine. On Tuesday, another man died during an ICE enforcement operation — he fled the immigration officials and was hit by a semi-truck. The United Nations high commissioner for human rights raised the alarm in June. The administration’s response to Arenas-Silva’s death was to re-send a press release that said “he received medical care and was seen by medical professionals.” That is the modern form of the denial the prophets called out: the claim that a system that routinely produces death is not actually producing death, because somewhere inside it, at some point, someone was seen by a professional. The family’s account directly contradicts the press release: they say he was denied his medication, and the Irwin facility’s own record — documented by a Senate investigation — makes the claim of “received medical care” functionally meaningless when the care provided was known to be abusive. Pope Francis named this at Lampedusa: a globalization of indifference that has taken from us the ability to weep. The weeping is the first thing that has to come back. You cannot fix a system that kills people if you refuse to say that it is killing them.
The Catholic tradition that the administration’s political allies claim to honor has a word for this. Romero called it pecado social — social sin, structural sin, the sin that lives in the arrangements a society makes and the institutions it builds and the facilities it reopens after they were closed for medical abuse. The Pharisees Jesus confronted were the ones who tithed mint and dill and cumin and neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. They were the ones who appeared righteous outwardly but were full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. The Irwin County Detention Center was not a secret. Its record was public. The administration knew what it was doing when it put a man with a medical condition into a facility whose medical practices had been condemned by a Senate investigation, and it knew what it was doing when it transferred him between facilities without his medication, and it knows what it is doing now when it tells the press that he received care.
The system that killed Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva is not the work of one administration or one party. The detention machinery was built by both parties, expanded by both parties, contracted out to private companies by both parties, and defended by both parties. The Irwin facility was opened under one administration, closed under another, and reopened under the current one. The machine is older than any single election cycle, and the people who operate it — the guards, the transport drivers, the officials who press “send” on the press releases — are people who could refuse. Romero stood in the cathedral of San Salvador and told the soldiers: Ningún soldado está obligado a obedecer una orden contra la ley de Dios. No soldier is obligated to obey an order against the law of God. The same word applies to the officials who process the transfers and the guards who watch the buses and the administrators who sign the contracts. The nurse who blew the whistle on Irwin’s medical abuse in 2021 showed what refusal looks like — she lost her job but stopped the practice. The same kind of institutional courage is needed now.
The door of return is open. It always is — that is the pastoral half of the register, the half that says the harm can stop and the system can be unmade. The institutions that built this machinery can dismantle it. The facilities that were closed can stay closed. The contracts that should never have been signed can be broken. The first step is to call the death what it is: not a tragedy, not an accident, not a regrettable outcome in a system that is otherwise functioning. It is a death produced by a system that chose to detain a man with a medical condition in a facility whose medical care was known to be abusive, and then chose not to give him his medicine. That is not a system malfunction. That is the system operating as designed. Arenas-Silva’s family is demanding an independent investigation into his death. That demand is the first step toward a system that can be held accountable. The only question is whether we will let it keep running.