A 31-year-old Haitian refugee named Daphy Michel, who lives and works in Pennsylvania under Temporary Protected Status, was last seen in ICE custody after a judge dropped all the criminal charges against her.
Three days later, her body was found near a bus stop in Pittsburgh, wearing an ankle monitor, far from her home and her support system.
On Thursday, the charges were dropped, but she didn’t return home.
On Monday, her brother got a call that she had died.
Police say she had a “major mental health episode” that got her into county jail, but the judge dismissed all the charges.
Still, ICE picked her up, drove her an hour away to their Pittsburgh office for processing, put an ankle monitor on her, and released her – without telling her family or taking her home.
A civil rights attorney, Joseph Murphy, who is working with her brother, called it outrageous: “It seems perfectly reasonable if you’re going to take someone all the way up here and that far out of their element, you could just as easily have driven them back.”
ICE confirmed she was enrolled in their alternatives to detention program on February 27, the day after the charges were dropped.
But they won’t say when she arrived at the Pittsburgh office, how long she was held, when or where she was released, or why she wasn’t taken home or her family wasn’t told.
On March 3, ICE got an alert that her ankle monitor had been removed.
By then, her body was already at the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office, waiting for an autopsy.
No one knows why she was alone in Pittsburgh, far from family and support.
The medical examiner says she died of cardiac arrest; toxicology results could take weeks.
This is the human cost of Trump’s mass-deportation machine: a vulnerable woman with temporary legal status, no criminal record, driven to a strange city, released with a monitor, and found dead days later.
ICE’s refusal to answer basic questions only makes the outrage worse.
If ICE driving Daphy Michel an hour away from home for processing, releasing her without telling her family, and leaving her to die on the street has you angry, like and share to demand answers.
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