If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
New 911 call records reveal that so far this year there’s been at least six suicide attempts by people detained at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
The records, obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, include a description of a suicide attempt by a 28-year-old female.
"Did she try to hang herself?," a 911 responder can be heard asking on the call.
"No, she wrapped up a trash bag and tried tying in a knot and tried to asphyxiate herself," a staff member at the detention center responded.
The staff member added that the same detainee had another suicide attempt "a few days ago."
Audio from another 911 calls reveals that a 52-year-old detainee tried to hang himself with a bed sheet. And another 911 call describes how a different detainee — a 24-year-old male from India — tried to jump from the facility’s second floor.
The records disclosing the suicide attempts come at a time when GEO Group, the private prison company running the ICE facility, is under scrutiny after last month’s death of a detainee. Charles Leo Daniel was a 61-year-old man from Trinidad and Tobago. The Pierce County Medical Examiner has not ruled on the cause of death, but the activist group La Resistencia has questioned whether it was a suicide.
Daniel was in solitary confinement for almost the entire four years he was held at the ICE facility. He was also in solitary for the majority of time he spent serving his 16-year-sentence for murder at Washington state prisons.
The South Sound 911 dispatch logs also show there have been at least twenty medical emergency calls and one fire at the facility so far this year.
GEO Group referred any questions to ICE. The federal agency has yet to comment.
Prior to Daniel, the last person to die at the ICE facility in Tacoma was Mergensana Amar, a 40-year-old Russian asylum-seeker. He died by suicide in 2018 while being held in solitary confinement.
Last month, 12 U.S. Senators, including Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement demanding that ICE limit the use of solitary confinement and provide more information on its current use.
"Studies have long shown that solitary confinement is an inhumane practice that leads to irreparable mental and physical harm," the letter reads.
Officials have not responded to the letter.
