Angel Padilla, a soft-spoken 39-year-old stricken with kidney cancer, walked outside prison walls for the first time in over twenty years on Monday afternoon.
Padilla was released from the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, a 1,575-bed prison run by the GEO Group corporation on contract for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after his family and supporters raised $15,000 in bond in less than one week.
The authors of a recent study on the immigrant deaths in ICE detention centers had called for his release, citing what they described as the agency’s failure to follow its own basic medical standards. Three of those deaths took place in detention centers run by GEO Group. Padilla said he had been mistreated by guards and denied the surgery he needs to remove a kidney tumor. ICE denied the allegations and said it was implementing a treatment plan.
Reached by phone, Padilla was being driven away from the prison gates by his family to his brother’s home in Fife.
“It’s surreal,” Padilla said, his voice quavering. “It’s been so long. I think my emotions aren’t really kicked in yet. It’s like it’s not really happening. I felt like it was never going to happen.”
Padilla committed an armed robbery when he was 17-years-old—a crime he admits was a terrible mistake—and tried as an adult. California’s prison system gave him stellar marks on a re-entry assessment and was set to release him last year after he served 19 years in prison—85 percent of his sentence. He earned his GED and a welding certificate in prison and planned to get metalworking job.
To his surprise, ICE arrested him at the prison gates. Padilla was brought to the United States as a child by his grandmother. ICE was determined to deport him back to El Salvador and to imprison him while it processed his case.
If Padilla is to stay in the United States, he still needs to convince an immigration judge to throw out the government’s deportation order. “I’m not the same kid that went to prison when he was 18,” he said. But for now, he said, “That’s not even in my head right now. I’m trying to take in everything that’s going on… I’m going to go to church.”
He said despite requests, ICE released him without giving him any of the medication he’d been prescribed for chronic pain. “Why they let us out like that, I don’t understand,” he said. “I need to go see the doctor.”
Interrupted at a MSNBC event yesterday by a protester who asked about the ongoing detention of immigrant families, Hillary Clinton pledged to shut down to private prisons, immigration raids, and family detention centers.