Latin American Rights Group Alleges Cover-Up Of Illegal Immigrant Death, Admits No Proof
LULAC claimed that an illegal immigrant inmate was beaten to death by corrections officers and another was put into a coma.
The GEO Group, which runs the prison, denied the beatings.
LULAC admitted there is not proof of a death and is calling for the prison to be shut down.
A Latin American civil rights organization claimed that guards in a Texas federal detention center beat a group of illegal immigrant inmates so severely that one inmate died, but prison accounts dispute the allegation and the organization is walking back its claim.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) held a press conference on Sept. 6 accusing a handful of corrections officers of brutally beating three Hispanic inmates at Big Spring’s Flightline Correctional Facility after the sister of Jose David Garache-Munoz, one of the aforementioned inmates, contacted LULAC with the claim.
“One [inmate] has died while in custody in ‘the Hole’ as a result of the terrible beat down,” LULAC’s civil rights chair, Agustin Pinedo, said in a press release. But Pinedo told The Daily Caller News Foundation that LULAC has not been able to substantiate the death.
LULAC President Domingo Garcia told TheDCNF that they have not been able to confirm the death but said that multiple prisoners believe the inmate in question is dead because “he’s missing.” Garcia explained that the organization received their information from various inmates, who have corroborated Garache-Munoz’s account.
While Garcia believes the missing inmate was killed, he suggested other possibilities, including that he was moved to another detention facility and is in fact alive. But LULAC’s press release did not include any alternative scenarios and only said that the inmate was killed by prison staff.
LULAC alleged that Garache-Munoz was “savagely beaten into unconsciousness” after officers entered his jail cell on the night of Aug. 11. After handcuffing and pepper spraying him, the guards reportedly dragged Garache-Munoz into an area not viewable by security cameras and attacked him until he was convulsing, leaving him in a coma for five days.
Two other inmates allegedly tried to intervene and were also brutally beaten and all three men were subsequently denied medical treatment, according to LULAC. As a result, one of the inmates, who LULAC originally said was named Sergio, succumbed to his injuries weeks later and died in solitary confinement on Aug. 31.
During LULAC’s press conference, Pinedo said the press release misidentified the supposedly dead inmate and identified him as Irving Ortiz, not Sergio.
The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison contractors and manager of Flightline, denied the accusations. After staff responded to a disturbance and identified the three inmates in question as instigators, the trio become increasingly aggressive, leading guards to use pepper spray on two of them, according to the GEO Group.
https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/16/immigrant-death-cover-up/