Daphy Michel.
Daphy Michel was a 31-year-old Haitian refugee, living and working legally in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. In 2022, Michel legally arrived in the US at a legal entry point in Texas and asked for asylum. She was eventually granted Temporary Protected Status. In September, Michel experienced a “significant mental health episode.” A neighbor called the police and she was taken to the county jail, where she was held on misdemeanor charges for six months. Neither she nor her brother, Carlo, could afford the $10,000 bound.
On February 27, Michel finally appeared before a judge, who dismissed the charges against her. She called her brother to share the good news that she would soon be released after six months in the brutal conditions of county lockup. Four days passed before Carlo got a call. But it wasn’t from Daphne. It was from a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center to tell Carlo that his sister was dead. She’d been found unresponsive at a bus stop an hour away in Pittsburgh with an electronic monitor strapped to her ankle. The doctor told Carlo his sister had died of cardiac arrest.
What Carlo didn’t know was that as soon as Daphy had been released from the county jail, she was taken into custody by ICE on a detainer warrant. The detainer warrant had likely been filed on the expectation that Michel could be immediately deported after being convicted of a crime, even a misdemeanor. But they took her into custody, even after the charges had been dismissed. Then, without informing anyone, ICE drove Michel to an ICE “Enforcement and Removal Operations” facility in south Pittsburgh, where she was processed under ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program. An electronic monitor was strapped to her ankle and instead of driving her back to Charleroi, ICE agents simply dumped her in south Pittsburgh, in an area she didn’t know, more than an hour from her brother and her home.
No one knows what happened to Daphy over the next two days, as she wandered the freezing streets of the city with no phone, no money and nowhere to sleep. But on Monday, March 2, a Port Authority maintenance worker found her body next to a bus shelter near the Smithfield St. Bridge. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. She was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. That’s when the emergency room doctor noticed the ICE ankle monitor on her leg.
“Why is she dead? What was she doing wandering around in Pittsburgh?” asked Joseph Murphy, a civil rights lawyer with the Allegheny Immigration Group. “It seems perfectly reasonable if you’re going to take someone all the way up here and that far out of their element and process them for all these different things, you could just as easily have driven them back down there, where they’d have their support networks and ideally, where things like this were much less of a risk.”
