Obviously, the man’s age immediately makes it look odd that he was in ICE detention in the first place. But here’s something else that’s striking about this case: According to the ICE note, the man was first paroled into the United States in 1966.
Whatever is learned about the death, those details are going to raise serious questions about the deployment of law enforcement resources under Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s dragnet. Miller has been ordering ICE officials to drive up the deportation numbers to the highest possible levels, and detaining a 75-year-old man who has been here for longer than a half century is apparently what this has come to entail.
Perez was also convicted of possession of a controlled substance twice, in 1981 and 1984. While it’s hard to know what that means absent more details, the upshot of this is that the drug charges appear minor, he likely served whatever his sentences were, and both occurred more than 40 years ago.
Perez reported chest pains, leading to the summoning of paramedics, who attempted to resuscitate him, after which he died at a Florida hospital, the notification says. While there’s no reason to assume as of now that Perez’s death was directly due to mishandling by ICE, its notification says he’d been diagnosed upon getting booked into Krome and then transferred temporarily to that hospital during his detention, so ICE knew he faced serious health risks.
ICE’s determination of Perez’s inadmissibility under the INA, a law passed in the early 1950s, also suggests that his drug conviction may be the basis for his attempted deportation, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“Not only is it unjust and unnecessary to execute a deportation order from two generations in the past, but when the target is an elderly person with health issues, detention is particularly dangerous,” Reichlin-Melnick told me.
This will also raise new questions about the major story unfolding in the background: The deeply questionable use of law enforcement resources to pump up deportation numbers. As it is, Miller is already allocating massive amounts of law enforcement agents into his removals in ways that are shifting them away from the pursuit of other more serious crimes.
That move literally releases into the United States a far more serious and dangerous criminal to target a far less serious offender, simply because Trump and Miller insist Abrego Garcia must be convicted of something, to sustain their propaganda narrative that all migrants are criminals.
In that regard, the death of Perez also highlights another deeply unsettling fact: If Trump gets his new budget bill passed, it will allocate tens of billions of additional dollars for detentions and deportations. That will lead to dramatically ramped up detentions under worsening conditions—and probably more deaths. In this, Perez is a harbinger of much, much worse to come.
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