Norma J. Torres

Mr. Speaker, Procedure · 20 wordsI close by bringing this back to my communities, the Inland Empire, because this is not happening somewhere far away.Procedure Claims · 154 wordsSince September of last year, four people have died while detained at Adelanto facility.¹ On February 23 of this year, Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano died in ICE custody.² He was a 52-year-old man.³ He had lived in this country for 28 years.⁴ He was a husband, a father, and his family is from Los Angeles.⁵ ICE arrested him and took him to the Adelanto facility, a facility run by the GEO Group, a private prison company.⁶ One month later, on March 25, he was dead.⁷ ICE says staff found him unconscious and unresponsive in his bunk and that they responded immediately.⁸ The men detained alongside him tell a much different story. They said he had been overheating. They said that he could not breathe. They said he pulled off his shirt because he felt like he was suffocating, and they said they tried to get help and that no one came until he was unconscious. Mr. Speaker, Claims · 20 wordswhen ICE announced his death, the headline on the press release read: ``Criminal illegal alien passes away in ICE custody.’’⁹ Reasoning · 49 wordsThat is how our government announced the death of a man who had built a life here for nearly three decades, not his name, not his age, not his family. The agency that had him in its care could not even bring themselves to call him by his name. Mr. Speaker, Procedure · 8 wordsI yield back the balance of my time.Procedure