The health of Rodney Taylor, a Liberian-born man who is a double amputee and is missing three fingers on one hand, has continued to worsen after being picked up by ICE and detained at Georgia’s Stewart immigration detention center and his case has now garnered support from a US senator.
Taylor, who has been detained for almost a year, told the Guardian he has now been diagnosed with bone spurs in his back, causing severe pain, while the silicone lining of one of his prosthetic legs has deteriorated, causing chafing and boils.
He has also faced problems with high blood pressure, his fiancee Mildred Pierre said, resulting in a prickly sensation in his right arm, dizziness and headaches and a recent change in medication.
“I feel like [being detained] is draining on my body,” Taylor told the Guardian.
Taylor’s plight has won support from Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, who has written to homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. In the letter, Warnock urges Noem “to take full and fair consideration, consistent with all agency rules and regulations … of the pressing health issues that Mr Taylor faces”, citing the Guardian’s reporting on his case.
The letter says Taylor is “a respected barber, [and] advocate for cancer awareness, and he has served and lived in his local community for 40 years”. It asserts that Taylor “has received widespread support from his community, including from a local elected official. A lieutenant from the Gwinnett county sheriff’s office and the chairperson of Gwinnett county board of commissioners described Mr Taylor as a ‘person of excellent character’ and ‘an asset to his community’ respectively.”
In response to a query about the letter, the homeland security department asked to be sent a copy of the letter and did not reply after receiving a copy by email.
Taylor and Pierre have a large family, with seven children. Pierre recently drove the 300 miles or so round trip to see Stewart with five of their children. She had not been able to make the trip for two months. When she arrived, an employee told her there was a “new policy” that only allowed two adults and three children per visit. Two of the children are above 18; she wound up staying in the car so they could visit Taylor.
Since Warnock sent his letter at the end of October, a judge from the same federal district court where an attorney filed a habeas corpus petition seeking Taylor’s release on bond while his immigration case is decided ruled in another habeas case that the Trump administration’s policy of not allowing bond violated existing immigration law.
The judge handling Taylor’s September petition on the issue has still not issued a ruling.
Brought to the US by his mother on a medical visa when he was a child, Taylor has had 16 operations. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life. He got engaged only 10 days before ICE detained him in January – due to a burglary conviction from when he was a teenager and for which the state of Georgia pardoned him in 2010, according to attorney Sarah Owings, who shared some of Taylor’s paperwork with the Guardian.
Taylor has a pending application for US residence – commonly known as a green card – but has not been released on bond. He says he has been subjected to multiple mishaps in detention, including the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand; and, during different periods, not being able to charge the batteries in his prosthetic legs or get them calibrated, leading to other injuries.
Concurrently, the Trump administration has dismantled the office for civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) and the immigration detention ombudsman (Oido) – two federal offices that provided oversight for healthcare and other issues.
Attorney Helen Parsonage, who filed the September petition seeking Taylor’s release on bond, said the recent ruling regarding mandatory detention would not benefit her client because of his decades-old conviction, and because the federal government has insisted in court that Taylor already has an order of deportation.
“They’re digging in their heels, fighting tooth and nail” to keep Taylor locked up, Parsonage said, referring to Ice.
“Members of Senator Warnock’s staff visited Rodney Taylor at Stewart detention center to hear about his conditions and to better advocate for his treatment,” Warnock’s office said in an email. “The senator’s office has also elevated medical concerns to detention center leadership and ICE congressional liaisons for multiple Stewart detainees,” the office said.
Now in his 11th month of detention, Taylor’s case is “symptomatic of the fact that conditions of confinement no longer concern the DHS”, Parsonage said. “It’s symptomatic of a lack of humanity when you can see someone struggling on a daily basis and obstruct their release. Callousness doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Taylor told the Guardian he “appreciate[s] the letter [from Senator Warnock]. But watching the way this administration is operating, it seems like they don’t care, sad to say. They have their own agenda.”
