Angel Padilla’s Case Puts a Spotlight on Conditions at the Tacoma Immigrant Detention Center and the Obama Administration’s Harsh Deportation Policy

Angel Padilla says, “I’m not trying to paint myself as this saint or anything. But I’ve paid my dues.” ANSEL HERZ

At about noon on February 19, Angel Padilla began to feel nauseated and dizzy inside Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center—a 1,575-bed prison run by the GEO Group, a private prison corporation.

Padilla is a slight, bespectacled 39-year-old man from El Salvador who suffers from chronic back pain and has a cancerous tumor in his left kidney. He banged on the door of his cell to get the attention of a guard. Through a small hole in the door, Padilla said, he pleaded with the guard to send a nurse.

“You don’t have any medical appointments, so you’re not going to go,” Padilla remembers the guard saying.

Padilla said he staggered away, vomited, and passed out. He woke up lying on the floor. He recalls a guard pulling him up and walking him toward the door, and then another guard calling out: “Sit him down. Don’t make him walk.”

Finally, a nurse appeared.

He was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center, given medication for his pain, and returned to the detention center later that day…