Deported in a Vegetative State

Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel, fifty-two, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas in February and held first at the Webb County Detention Center, then in Port Isabel. His family spoke with him by phone daily until June, when the calls abruptly stopped. The detention center told them only that he had a “health issue.” Locating him took two months and three lawyers. By August, he was bedridden in a vegetative state. On September 3, ICE put him on an air ambulance to Costa Rica with diagnoses of encephalopathy, rhabdomyolysis, and the loss of his ability to feed himself. He died in a hospital in his hometown of Pérez Zeledón on October 26.

Asked about the case, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the medical care Gamboa had received was better than many immigrants “have received in their entire lives,” and noted his prior immigration violations — answers that addressed neither what had happened to him nor why his family had been unable to find him for two months. The deportation of a man already in a vegetative state, by air ambulance, is the operational fact at the center of the case; the question of what happened to his body during the months his family could not reach him remains, formally, unanswered.