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BREAKING: IT'S MURDER! Death of a 31-year-old woman dropped by ICE at a Pittsburgh bus stop in freezing weather with no coat ruled a homicide!
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office has ruled the death by hypothermia of Haitian immigrant Daphy Michel, who spent more than 30 hours shivering at a Pittsburgh bus stop after being dumped by ICE, a homicide.
Three days earlier, Michel had been in Washington County Jail on misdemeanor charges that a judge dismissed. Her family was waiting to pick her up in Charleroi – just a 40-minute drive away.
But because ICE had placed a detainer on her, instead of releasing her to loved ones, authorities handed her over to immigration enforcement.
ICE fitted her with an ankle monitor, put her in their “Alternatives to Detention” program, and then dropped her off on the South Side of Pittsburgh, far from home, in February cold, wearing only light clothing. She never made it back.
“When you release someone like that that far from home, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Her attorney Joseph Murphy said. “She would have been in her own environment. She wouldn’t have been sitting around a bus stop [with no coat] in February, and she’d be alive now.”
The death at the hands of ICE was no accident. It was the direct result of cold, bureaucratic cruelty, with immigration officials choosing enforcement theater over basic human decency.
County Executive Sara Innamorato said the death was “a tragedy that appears that with a little humanity, it could have been completely avoidable.”
After the death, friends and family gathered at the bus stop where she died and held a vigil for her (photo, right).
This horror is part of a pattern under Trump’s ICE that hasn’t dissipated since the agency has fallen from the headlines: they still treat people as disposable, and appear to get perverse satisfaction making life as difficult as possible for the people they harass, like dropping vulnerable individuals in unfamiliar places with no support.
Michel didn’t deserve to die alone in the cold on a bench because the system cared more about optics than people. Her death should haunt every official who signed off on this cruel process. Each one should be worried about the pendulum of justice swinging in their direction now that the ruling is official.
If this preventable, heartbreaking tragedy makes you furious, like and share this post.
No one should die abandoned in brutal winter's cold because ICE decided their life didn’t matter.
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