The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is suing The GEO Group, which runs the immigration detention facility in Aurora, on allegations of negligence leading to the wrongful death of Kamyar Samimi in 2017.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado on behalf of the Samimi family, and it names the private company as well as Dr. Jeffrey Elam Peterson, the detention facility’s only doctor on staff.
Samimi, a 64-year-old Thornton resident, died while in custody Dec. 2, 2017, a little more than two weeks after he was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents prior to deportation to his native country of Iran. He was also taking doctor-prescribed methadone at the time and did not receive appropriate treatment for withdrawal, according to an ACLU report. A federal investigation into his death also found that his medical care fell short of ICE standards.
The lawsuit alleges a violation of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination by federal agencies on the basis of disabilities. Attorneys say The GEO Group and Peterson discriminated against Samimi, who had an opioid use disorder disability. ACLU attorney Mark Silverstein called Samimi’s death tragic and preventable and said the decision to take Samimi off the methadone he used for more than two decades cold turkey was medically unjustifiable.
“The lawsuit highlights one example of what’s happening in detentions around the country,” Silverstein said, including “abysmal and substandard medical care” and “caging people unjustly for civil immigration violations.”
Samimi was a permanent resident and green card holder after arriving in the United States from Iran in 1976. He faced deportation over a 2005 conviction for possession of less than 1 gram of cocaine in Arapahoe County. He had an pending court date to appear before a federal judge when he died.
The lawsuit comes almost two months after the ACLU released a scathing report about the medical conditions in the immigration detention facility, detailing alleged medical abuses and neglect. The report said that detainees are “confined without access to sufficient medical care, adequate nutrition, legal resources or, in many cases, basic human decency.”
“I think it’s important to bring this to light,” Tony Samimi, Kamyar Samimi’s son, told The Denver Post on Tuesday. “Our dad wasn’t just a number or a statistic. He was a family man.”
Despite increased scrutiny toward the detention facility and its treatment of detainees, ICE continues to defend its practices, saying the agency is committed to the health and welfare of those in custody.
The Aurora detention center had a total of 46 medical personnel, which includes one full-time physician and a host of other medical professionals, for up to 1,500 detainees, according to information obtained in September by The Denver Post. The GEO Group previously said it added additional medical staff this year and the company is in discussions to add another doctor.
Neda Samimi-Gomez, Kamyar Samimi’s daughter, worked with the ACLU to bring awareness to the issues that led to her father’s death and noted that “my father was not the first.”
In an interview Tuesday morning, she said her family hopes the lawsuit will bring some accountability for what happened to her father while in ICE custody.
Although the federal investigation into her father’s death showed problems with the care he received while in the Aurora detention facility, it took the ACLU’s investigation before the Samimi family received details about exactly what happened, she said.
“We want to bring accountability to GEO and the doctor so we can continue to have some change and stop people from dying,” she said.
