Chinese woman commits suicide at Az Border Patrol station; BP failed to conduct welfare checks

A 52-year-old woman committed suicide at the Border Patrol station in Yuma on Saturday after she was taken into custody by agents in California, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal said Wednesday. 

Jayapal sharply criticized the agency and said “initial reports” show that Border Patrol agents failed to conduct welfare checks before the woman’s death, and she said surveillance footage shows the woman creating a noose and hanging herself, but medical response was delayed for two hours.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not follow internal policies about publicly acknowledging the death of someone in custody, providing a statement only after the Tucson Sentinel made direct inquiries about the matter Thursday.

Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Seattle, said the woman was taken into custody in California after officials said she overstayed her visa. 

The unnamed woman, who the Sentinel determined had apparently been detained last Wednesday following a traffic stop near Needles, Calif., was transferred to Arizona where she was detained until her death over the weekend, Jayapal said.  

“When Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents take a person into custody, they are responsible for their well-being, full stop,” said Jayapal, the ranking member of the House’s Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee. “This detainee died by suicide, and initial reports have indicated that certain CBP procedures to ensure the safety and welfare of individuals in custody were not conducted,” she said in a statement released by her congressional office. 

“There is no excuse for why agents cannot verify if some of the necessary welfare checks occurred – or why some of the documented welfare checks were incorrectly reported.” 

“Surveillance footage showed the woman create a noose and tie it around her neck, yet no medical response occurred for nearly two hours,” Jayapal said.

Jayapal added that
according to “information provided by CBP” logs from the agency “note
that multiple welfare checks were conducted, however, CBP OPR was unable
to verify if those checks actually occurred. She added that in some of
the checks, a Border Patrol Processing Coordinator said he did not
“conduct the logged checks.”

Border
Patrol processing coordinators are not law enforcement personnel, but
are trained to “bring a humanitarian approach to the care of people in
custody.” Created in 2014 when the agency took thousands of children
into custody, the position was expanded during the Biden administration,
which hoped to create a corps of about 1,200 coordinators to help
agents process people into custody and send Border Patrol agents back
into the field.

Customs and Border Protection officials confirmed the woman’s death in a statement to the Tucson Sentinel.

On Saturday, March 29, a 52-year-old woman was “unresponsive in a cell” at the Yuma Border Patrol Station, a CBP spokesman said. “Border Patrol personnel provided medical assistance,” he wrote. “Emergency Medical Services were called to the station and transported the woman to the local hospital, where she was pronounced deceased.”

“Consistent with CBP protocol, the Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting an investigation of the incident,” he said, adding the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General was also notified. 

“Additional information will be made available in accordance with CBP’s policy,” he said. 

It remains unclear why the woman was in detention at the Yuma Sector’s main station. 

The Yuma Sector straddles the Colorado River and includes part of Southern California and well as Yuma County, Arizona. There are three stations in the sector, include the Bythe, Yuma and Wellton stations, and the sector covers about 126 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. 

A day before the woman died, Yuma Sector Border Patrol announced they had arrested two people from China and seized more than $220,000 in cash during a vehicle stop on Wednesday, March 26, on Interstate 40 near Needles, Calif. 

Agents from the Yuma Sector’s Blythe station stopped a minivan and among the four Chinese nationals in the car, two were illegally present in the U.S., officials said. 

They also discovered the cash “concealed in aluminum foil in two duffel bags.” The agents arrested two people — a 38-year-old male and a 52-year-old female – and charged them as inadmissible under federal law. They added the cash “was believed to be proceeds from illegal activity and was seized for laundering” under federal laws providing for civil asset forfeiture.

‘Incredibly concerned’ 

Jayapal said the woman was held after agents “determined that she had overstayed a B1/B2 visitor visa,” which is a short-term visa for business or tourism.  

Jayapal also criticized the actions of BP agents at the station and said OPR investigators must “provide answers on why welfare checks were not conducted and falsely recorded, and why this woman was able to die by suicide without any guard intervention.” 

She noted last year, two people died at the Northwest Immigrant Processing Center, a facility managed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

“I remain incredibly concerned about the conditions at these facilities,” she said. CBP and ICE are both under the umbrella of the the Department of Homeland Security, currently led by Secretary Kristi Noem. 

“Another preventable death only increases that concern,” Jayapal said. “Reports have consistently shown that the United States falls far short of its obligations to treat all detained people with dignity and fairness.” 

Conditions in Border Patrol stations have faced widespread criticism for more than a decade. In one case focused on the neighboring Tucson Sector—which runs from Yuma County to the New Mexico border—a federal judge wrote in 2020 ruling that conditions are “presumptively punitive and violate the Constitution.”

CBP missed self-set deadline for announcing in-custody death 

The announcement from Jayapal came days after a self-imposed deadline CBP set to publicly acknowledge in-custody deaths. 

In 2018, following the death of a 7-year-old girl in New Mexico, CBP issued new guidelines. As part of the new policy, CBP said immediately following the death of a person in custody, officials would tell lawmakers about the incident with 24 hours, and issue statements to the press an hour after that. 

That process is supposed to alert more than a half-dozen offices within CBP, including the commissioner of CBP and the Office of Professional Responsibility. The alert would also include the Inspector General’s office, and the relevant consulate office through the State Department.

As one of the top lawmakers on the relevant House committee, Jayapal would be one of those informed. But CBP has not yet made any public statement about the death, responding only to the Sentinel’s inquiries.

Until December 2018, CBP did not have a formal policy to announce in-custody deaths, however that changed following revelations by the Washington Post that a seven-year-old girl had died while in Border Patrol custody. 

That year, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin and her father, Nery Gilberto Caal, 29, turned themselves into Border Patrol after they crossed into the United States with 161 other people near Forward Operating Base Bounds, in the boot heel of New Mexico near the Antelope Wells Port of Entry—a remote and lonely stretch of terrain south of Interstate 10. 

“To secure and maintain the public trust, CBP’s intent is to be accessible and transparent by providing appropriate information to the Congress and the public regarding any death occurring in custody,” the agency said.

Border crossings down

Since October, Yuma Sector agents have taken 6,605 people into custody, a 76 percent decrease since the same period a year earlier. CBP officials have celebrated the drop and said in March, BP agents took 7,180 people into custody nationwide, and daily southwest border apprehensions fell to around 230 per day, part of a precipitous decline that began last June.