Daphy Michel was a 31-year-old migrant from Haiti. She had humanitarian status and an asylum application actively in process. That means she was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She wasn’t hiding from anyone or dodging a court date. She was following the process, the same process this country claims to want people to follow, and it still didn’t save her.
Last September, someone in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, called 911 because Michel appeared to be having a mental health crisis in the street. She was screaming at voices only she could hear and holding a knife. Police locked her up in the Washington County jail, and she sat there for six months while her court hearings kept getting pushed back. A judge finally dismissed the charges in late February and ordered her released. That should have been the moment things got better. Instead, ICE was waiting to ambush her like the cowards they are.
Agents arrested her and drove her in the opposite direction of her home, away from Charleroi and into their office in South Pittsburgh, and then they just let her go. She had an ankle monitor, sure, so they knew exactly where she was the entire time she was out there dying.
They released her wearing summer clothes into 20-degree weather, in a city she likely didn’t know well, with a phone that DHS insisted was fully charged even though her attorney says her phone plan had actually expired while she was in jail.
Surveillance footage shows her sitting at a bus shelter on Pittsburgh’s south side for roughly 24 hours, first upright in the daylight, then slumped over as night fell, and finally on the ground the next morning.
Someone eventually called for help, but by the time she reached the hospital, it was too late. She died from hypothermia. The Allegheny County medical examiner ruled it a homicide months later, in June, and described her as a vulnerable adult suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier when ICE decided to cut her loose.
DHS’s response was to post on social media that the agency had “nothing to do with this woman’s death.” They also called her an illegal alien, which is a lie, since her attorney has been clear that she entered the country legally and had humanitarian status. So not only did they leave a mentally ill woman alone in the freezing cold, but they also slandered her since she wasn’t alive to defend herself.
The medical examiner’s office noted that ruling a death a homicide isn’t the same as declaring criminal guilt, just that another person’s actions caused her death. That means someone decided driving her away from home and dropping her off in the cold with no support was an acceptable plan.
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Because it’s almost a beat-for-beat rerun of what happened to Nurul Amin Shah Alam in Buffalo, just one week prior to Daphy Michel’s death.
He was the nearly blind Rohingya refugee who barely spoke English, taken into CBP custody after his release from jail, and then dropped off outside a closed Tim Hortons in the middle of winter with no coat and no plan.
He wandered for days before he was found dead, and his death was also ruled a homicide. Two people, both vulnerable in ways that made basic survival difficult, were both handed off by federal agents into brutal weather with nowhere to go, both dead within days, and both agencies falling back on the exact same denial. Nothing to do with us.
Recently, when talking about ICE, I’ve harped on the phrase “weaponized vehicle” because it seems that’s become standard operating procedure among ICE agents when their trigger fingers act like they have poison ivy.
Apparently there’s a second standard operating procedure running alongside the first one, and it involves the people who can’t fight back. Instead, they dump them off in the street and let the weather finish the job. Shoot the ones who might have the agency to resist, abandon the ones who don’t, and either way, walk away clean. It’s a hell of a system if you’re the one wearing the mask.
Speaking of which, once again, we have no names or faces. Just an agency statement and a wall of silence, because that’s how the secret police tactics of this administration work. Masks on, badges and bodycams optional, while accountability is nonexistent.
Somewhere out there are the specific people who decided a mentally ill woman in summer clothes could handle a Pittsburgh winter night alone, and they’re going about their lives right now like nothing happened.
I keep telling myself that a day of reckoning is coming for these people, and I hope it gets here sooner rather than later. When it does, I want these masked cowards to find out exactly what it feels like to sit in one of the overcrowded, disease-ridden, falling-apart detention centers they’ve been so eager to shove innocent people into. If there’s any justice left in this country, it’ll be the very same ones.
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