‘An incomplete happiness’: An activist wins his freedom after nearly two years of medical neglect at an ICE facility

Colombian Julián Palacios Obregón spent 650 days in immigration detention in the United States. He was sick for most of that time. A month after being transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington state, he began vomiting and suffering diarrhea with fecal incontinence that forced him to wear diapers. Although he was prescribed antibiotics that temporarily improved symptoms caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the underlying problem repeatedly returned: he remained exposed to cloudy water and to food he often described as raw or foul-smelling.

“Before I arrived at the detention center I was not sick, I had no health problems,” the 27-year-old activist said in a video call with EL PAÍS in August from the ICE facility.

Julián Palacios is one of hundreds who fall ill after entering immigration custody or whose preexisting conditions worsen because of inadequate medical care at these facilities. The problem is widespread. So much so that in June hundreds of detainees in at least 33 states alleged varying degrees of medical negligence in federal lawsuits against ICE centers. They included cases in which detainees were not given their medications, had requests go unanswered, suffered worsened infections, and in some instances collapsed or had seizures due to delays in officials’ responses.

The situation has worsened because President Donald Trump’s administration continues to pressure federal agents to maintain an unrelenting pace of arrests. Detention centers have filled with immigrants and some have even exceeded their capacity, according to official reports. As a result, since January 2025 more than 50 people in the agency’s custody have died, according to ICE’s own figures. Some detainees with medical conditions who spoke to EL PAÍS said they prefer to drop their immigration cases for fear that their illnesses will worsen and they could die.

Desperate to win his freedom, Palacios Obregón represented himself in court. He twice petitioned for release via habeas corpus in federal courts and filed five humanitarian requests with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He sought a colonoscopy that a gastroenterologist had recommended in May 2025 to evaluate other possible diagnoses and treatments. But due to staff errors at the detention center that prevented him from being prepared in time for the procedure, he had already missed three appointments: the last was rescheduled for August 31, the same day as his immigration court hearing.

Palacios feared his illness might develop into cancer, until a district court backed him and granted his release on September 11, 2026.

“The Court concludes that the Government’s repeated failed attempts to provide the petitioner with adequate treatment — including a diagnostic colonoscopy — have rendered the care he received so deficient that his detention takes on a punitive character, in violation of due process,” reads the order from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

The activist said in the video call that the center’s medical staff ran tests, prescribed antibiotics and once transferred him to a hospital. But in emergencies “they do not prioritize cases”; and day to day they ignored medical orders from their own staff regarding his diet — no tomato or spicy foods — and access to showers. He believes that in the last six months of detention health staff were “negligent” in failing to provide medications to fight the bacterium, and in failing to push the system to follow their instructions and schedule the specialist appointments he needed.

Days before Palacios’s release, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman told EL PAÍS that any allegation he had not received appropriate medical care was “false.” They were referring to the same services Palacios mentioned, but not to the failure to meet basic requirements that would have allowed him to attend his colonoscopy.

Judge Kimberly K. Evanson — who had been familiar with the case for months — wrote in the release order that what Palacios experienced was comparable to the “cruel punishment” prison officials inflict on convicted inmates in criminal jails when they “deliberately ignore a serious medical need (...) The conditions are excessive in relation to the purposes of immigration detention.”

That was also Julián Palacios’s feeling: “People who have committed crimes have more rights right now than we do.”

His case was presented in June 2026 by human rights organization Global Rights Advocacy to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. They warned that his detention was “increasingly punitive, as he resists pressure to give up his rights and while he suffers medical conditions that put his life at risk.”

“It’s totally inhuman”

When Palacios spoke with EL PAÍS in August, he had spent a week confined 23 hours a day in a two-by-three-meter cell in the segregation area, without anyone explaining the reasons. After that conversation, he was kept 11 more days in that space.

“It’s totally inhuman,” he said. Even though he repeatedly told guards about his fecal incontinence, he only had secure access to showers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, like any other detainee in the unit. A DHS spokesman confirmed to EL PAÍS that additional showers for hygiene needs “had to be approved.”

He felt the limitations in medical response even in emergencies. Palacios said that prolonged illness sometimes led him to vomit blood and experience stomach pains at the highest level on a one-to-10 scale. “These are pains that require medical attention to at least relieve the pain. There is no possibility of seeing a doctor immediately, because the only thing they tell you is to wait until the next day, to make an appointment.”

Getting that appointment with the facility doctor sometimes took him five days or a week. Sometimes they didn’t even call him.

Besides what he suffered, during that time he saw fellow detainees whose medical situations worsened. One man with diabetes developed an infected foot wound that began to ooze pus. After a protest by Palacios and others demanding treatment, he was examined: 20 days later he returned from the hospital but had had his foot amputated.

Various reports from the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights have for nearly a decade reported sexual violence at the Tacoma facility, as well as unsanitary conditions in the kitchen, spoiled food (sometimes with worms), medical negligence and excessive use of solitary confinement, restraints and retaliation measures after strikes. In 2020, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures to protect the rights of detainees there.

A future of “uncertainty”

Julián Palacios was taken into ICE custody at the Tacoma facility on December 2, 2024, a DHS spokesman confirmed to EL PAÍS. “He arrived at the port of entry in Sumas [in Washington state] requesting admission” to the country under asylum. DHS said that in August 2025 a judge issued a deportation order, although his removal to Colombia was prohibited. Months later, in February 2026, he was offered deportation to a third country, Palacios said: his options were Mexico and Nicaragua. “I refused.”

His asylum case was reopened and now, free, he must defend himself against possible deportation to Canada. He cannot return to Colombia because he has been shot there and was once kidnapped for his anti-corruption activism. He also cannot go to Canada, where he obtained resident status, because — he says — his home in the city of Grande Prairie, Alberta, was vandalized and the word “sapo” was painted on the facade in Spanish (in Latin America the term is used as an insult against those who talk too much or work as informants). He believes Colombians who located him in Canada did it.

EL PAÍS verified the incidents Palacios suffered by reviewing the evidence in his immigration file: it includes police and prosecutor reports, as well as photographs of his injuries and evidentiary material for each case.

After being released, he does not know when his next hearing before an immigration judge will be, but this Friday he appeared before his deportation officer in great uncertainty. “I am afraid of possible re-detention. I am afraid of what may happen to me in the future,” he said in a video call with EL PAÍS, sitting at his brother’s home in Washington.

His medical conditions have not improved. His family is helping him gather paperwork to request an appointment at a hospital. He’s grateful that now, if he feels ill, his brother can take him to the emergency room. He’s also grateful that he no longer has to ask anyone for permission to wash, to eat or simply to sit in a park and breathe.

Julián Palacios is happy: after nearly two years he was able to hug his mother, who is visiting, and his brother and nephews. “It felt like what I was living was a dream.”

A week after his release, he rested and attended a fundraiser for Global Rights Advocacy, the organization that has supported him in preparing his legal defense. He saw it as a celebration of his return to freedom.

But Julián also feels sadness. Few days have passed since he left Tacoma: “I can’t forget everything I went through and it makes me sadder to think that my friends stayed there, locked up in deplorable conditions. It’s an incomplete happiness.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition