A memorial in Pittsburgh for Haitian migrant Daphy Michel, who died in March. Photo by Sophia Lucente, courtesy of Pittsburgh’s Public Source.
Just days after refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam died in downtown Buffalo, another migrant in Pittsburgh also died on the street in the cold.
The cases bear eerie similarities and both have attracted the attention of Congressional representatives. Legislation is now pending in the House of Representatives to prevent future migrant deaths.
Shah Alam died February 24 after he’d been released by Border Patrol agents at a closed coffee shop days earlier. His death was caused by a burst intestinal ulcer and ruled a homicide because agents had placed him “into a hostile environment” that he could not have gotten himself out of, the Erie County Medical Examiner later ruled.
In Pittsburgh, a nearly identical fact pattern played out less than a week later.
Daphy Michel, a Haitian immigrant, died March 2 at a bus stop on the city’s South Shore. She’d ended up there after she was released from ICE custody. Her death, due to hypothermia, was also ruled a homicide because it was “caused by the actions of another individual,” according to the Alleghany County Office of the Medical Examiner.
Like Shah Alam, Michel had been incarcerated on charges that were later dropped before her transfer to immigration custody. She spent six months in the Washington County Correctional Facility on misdemeanor charges of making terroristic threats and harassment. Local authorities dismissed those charges and she was released to ICE custody in late February.
ICE enrolled her in the agency’s “alternatives to detention” program, a type of parole, and released her from its South Side office February 28. She then walked some 30 blocks to the South Shore bus stop where she died March 2. Pittsburgh’s PublicSource, a nonprofit news outlet, later obtained surveillance footage from Pittsburgh Regional Transit showing Michel sat at the bus stop for more than 24 hours before dying from the cold.
“A full review suggests that Michel may have been in the shelter the entire time,” the news outlet reported in April, based on its review of the video footage. “Her position changed little, other than moving from one side of the bench to the other from the morning of March 1 until early on March 2.”
After being discovered by a transit employee the morning of March 2, Michel was transported to a hospital where she was pronounced dead in the early afternoon.
Like Border Patrol in the Shah Alam case, ICE denied responsibility for Michel’s death.
In a statement to Investigative Post, Pittsburgh-area Rep. Summer Lee said the two migrant deaths “expose the horrifying truth that [the Trump] administration is taking vulnerable people into custody, stripping them of their safety and support, and then abandoning them as though their lives do not matter.”
“These were avoidable tragedies and are the result of a violent, reckless system that treats immigration status as permission to discard human beings,” Lee said.
