Haitian Immigrant With Severe Mental Illness, Plans to Sue After She Froze to Death in a Pittsburgh Bus Shelter in Late

The family of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian immigrant with severe mental illness, plans to sue after she froze to death in a Pittsburgh bus shelter in late February, days after being released from ICE custody in near-freezing temperatures while wearing summer clothes. On the night of Feb. 26, the Michel family in Pennsylvania expected to see Daphy again soon.

After six months in jail, a judge had dismissed criminal charges against her, and one brother was told she would likely be released the next day. He worried about her mental illness but was assured someone would call him to pick her up. That call never came.

On Monday, a Pittsburgh hospital called to say Daphy Michel, 31, had died. “At the court, I saw my sister. I saw Daphy.

She wasn’t having any problem, her brother said through an interpreter in an interview with Pittsburgh’s Action News 4, asking to remain anonymous. Michel came from Haiti to the U. S. in 2022 hoping to build “a safer life. Maintenance workers found her at a bus shelter on Pittsburgh’s South Side, more than 20 miles (32km) from home, dressed in summer clothes.

The temperature was 20F (-6.6C). She was not breathing and had no discernible pulse, according to local Port Authority police. In June, the medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.

On Saturday, a family lawyer announced plans to file a lawsuit “very soon. Michel was a resident of Charleroi, a Pennsylvania community with a significant Haitian immigrant population. Advocates say a combination of inattention to mental health in detention, negligence in releasing vulnerable detainees, and informal police cooperation created a fatal chain of events.

Bus camera footage released by Pittsburgh Regional Transit shows Michel did not move from the bus stop for more than 24 hours before dying. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that ICE processed Michel and placed her in removal proceedings, despite a pending asylum hearing, after her release from Washington County jail. In a June statement on X, DHS claimed ICE had “NOTHING to do with this woman’s death, saying she passed away three days after encounter, and described her as an “illegal alien from Haiti” released “with all of her belongings, including a fully charged phone, in sunny weather in the middle of Pittsburgh.

DHS has not responded to Guardian questions. Joseph Murphy, an immigration and civil rights attorney representing Michel’s family, disputes those claims. He says neither her entry nor her presence in the U. S. was illegal; her phone was useless because her plan lapsed; the south side is a “dangerous neighborhood”; and her mental illness was “obvious, so she should not have been left alone in an unfamiliar city.

“It was a very bad judgment call” by ICE, he said. Michel did not speak English, was illiterate and undereducated, and had been jailed six months after a mental health crisis. While detained, she appeared to refuse bathing, highlighting her depleted state before being handed from local to federal custody and released with an ankle monitor.

Adrianna Torres-García, deputy director of the Free Migration Project in Philadelphia, said: “At no point have I seen ICE show concern about people reaching their final destinations [after release from detention]. That hasn’t been the practice under either past or current US administrations. “Once people leave the detention center or jail where they were held, it’s as if it’s no longer ICE’s responsibility – they don’t worry about anything else, nor do they help them get to their destination, make plans or anything of the sort. Sometimes they just hand them a bus ticket, and that’s it, they added, recalling that when the Berks County detention center in Pennsylvania was open, officials would “hand someone a bus ticket and say: ‘Well, good luck,’ regardless of whether it was summer or winter, or whether the person had family.”””””””””