The Tacoma Fire Department responded to an emergency call from a nurse at the Northwest ICE Processing Center Sunday morning. They found one of the detainees lying face down.

“He arrived at our facility on Tuesday, we moved him into our medical accommodation unit. “He is weaning off fentanyl,” the nurse told emergency responders over the phone. “We just found him face down in his room. He vomited. “He’s unresponsive, but he’s breathing.”

The Tacoma Police Department confirmed they received the emergency call at 7 a.m. Sunday and forwarded it to the fire department.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said detainee Jose Manuel Sanchez-Castro, 36, died at the Tacoma facility later that day. He was the second person to die at the Tacoma plant this year and the fourth person to die at the processing center since 2006.

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Sanchez-Castro was first arrested in 2009 when he was 21 and chose to leave the United States. He had three more run-ins with the law in the following years. In the most recent arrest, he was convicted of manufacturing and distributing amphetamine and/or methamphetamine in 2016, according to ICE.

“First of all, I express my condolences to Mr. Sanchez-Castro’s family and loved ones,” US Representative Pramila Jayapal said in a press statement.

Japapal, a Washington Democrat, inspected the Tacoma facility after inmate Charles Leo Daniel died earlier this year. He was not allowed to speak directly to the detainees, but he said he remained concerned about living conditions in the processing centre.

“Detained people at the facility have been repeatedly forced to resort to hunger strikes to protest conditions, including allegations of medical negligence, unsafe food, and unsanitary conditions, among other complaints,” he said.

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According to the nurse, Sanchez-Castro arrived at the facility on October 22, the day before representatives of the Organization of American States, a treaty group that includes the United States, were to visit the facility with detainees at the invitation of the federal government.

Prior to this visit, OAS representatives met with attorneys, federal officials, state agencies and the Washington Attorney General’s Office to try to learn more about the facility and its conditions.

The same concerns expressed by Representative Jayapal were expressed to Roberta Clarke and members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States.

The group visited downtown Tacoma to monitor the living conditions of 14 people detained at the facility, which was chosen as an example of how detainees are treated.

The investigation began in 2020 when concerns were raised about the sanitary conditions of the facility, access to adequate healthcare and a expedited immigration hearing process arising from Covid-19 concerns.

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Clarke said that during their visit, the human rights commission could only see the common areas of the facility, but not the intimate areas where people lived. This included the rooms in the medical wing where Sanchez-Castro was kept before he died.

“This was a guided walkthrough and we saw what was shown to us, but we did not see the areas of the facility where people usually live with them,” Clarke told KUOW.

Detainees and detainees’ families encountered ICE and GEO Group “mutually deferring accountability” for reports of retaliation, verbal aggression, and racism, the commission wrote in a press release following their visit. They want the federal government to make sure it protects the rights of the 14 selected detainees and everyone else processed at the center.