Roberto Jimenez Gutierrez, a 43-year-old man from Guatemala who was arrested by federal immigration authorities in Escondido and transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego on Oct. 9, died at the facility just over two weeks later on Saturday.
His death was the 30th in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this year and the 63rd of President Donald Trump’s second term. It comes amid heightened scrutiny of ICE practices and heavy criticism of conditions inside the center by detainees, activists and elected officials.
An ICE news release said facility staff found Jimenez unresponsive in a cell and tried to wake him at 11:31 a.m. before contacting medical personnel, declaring a medical emergency and calling 911. CPR was administered at 11:38 a.m. and paramedics from California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection arrived at 11:52, about 20 minutes after he was found unresponsive.
He was pronounced dead at 12:23 p.m., less than one hour after staff first noticed his condition.
Deaths in ICE detention have increased under the Trump administration’s unprecedented mass deportation campaign from 26 in former President Joe Biden’s four years in office.
This is the first death reported at Otay Mesa in Trump’s second term.
San Diego County Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer and Paloma Aguirre held a press conference Tuesday afternoon to insist on cooperation with inspections and a new investigation.
“My heart goes out to their family,” Aguirre said. “The men and women detained are not abstract numbers. They’re members of our community.”
The San Diego County Supervisors sued ICE and CoreCivic, the private company that operates the Otay Mesa Detention Center and other immigration facilities, to force an inspection in June.
A three-part inewsource investigation published later that month found dozens of immigrants who described deteriorating health and inadequate care at Otay Mesa Detention Center in court records, a disproportionate number of ambulance calls for seizures, and care described by a detainee who was a Type 1 diabetic that medical experts said was “potentially life threatening.”
More recently, the county found that the facility failed to promptly report confirmed tuberculosis cases to county health inspectors. The litigation over the county inspections is ongoing, and a mediation meeting between the parties in court is scheduled for Thursday.
“No one should lose their basic human rights just because they’re behind bars,” said Lawson-Remer, chair of the county board of supervisors. “We should not have to sue the federal government every time a public health officer needs to walk inside an ICE detention facility.”
Lawson-Remer and Aguirre said Tuesday they have sent a letter to ICE and CoreCivic demanding that they cooperate with a San Diego County Medical Examiners’ Office investigation, preserve records related to Jimenez’s death, and provide a written account of actions taken to correct problems found in the county’s June inspection.
A spokesperson for CoreCivic said in a statement that, “We are deeply saddened by the loss of anyone in our care,” and directed further questions to ICE.
CoreCivic said ICE is responsible for reviewing deaths in custody.
ICE said Jimenez had been deported three times. It said his death was under investigation and that an autopsy would be conducted to determine the official cause and manner of death.
ICE said he was convicted for selling liquor to a minor and had been arrested several times.
83% of people held at Otay Mesa on a typical day last fiscal year had no criminal conviction, which is about the same as the national figure, according to the most recent data posted by ICE.
