Jun. 15, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT<\/time><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Medical examiners ruled the death of a Haitian woman seeking asylum in the U.S. to be a homicide via hypothermia after she was left by federal immigration officers at a Pittsburgh bus shelter in February.<\/p>\n

According to The Associated Press<\/a>the examiner described Michel as “suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier” when she was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody on Feb. 27. Prior to her release, she had been held in jail for six months following a reported mental health episode.<\/p>\n

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Michel was a native of Haiti who was seeking asylum in the U.S. after arriving at the southern border in 2022, said Joseph Patrick Murphy, her family’s attorney. She was granted humanitarian parole based on urgent humanitarian need, but she did not live to see a hearing scheduled for two weeks after she died, he said.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis told the AP in an email that, “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death. She passed away THREE days after ICE encountered her.”<\/p>\n
ICE gave a similar statement to Pittsburgh’s Action News 4<\/a>saying Michel “was released with all of her belongings, including a fully charged phone, in sunny weather in the middle of Pittsburgh, where public transport is readily available.”<\/p>\n
Sunshine of course doesn’t preclude freezing temperatures. But as always, context is important with regard to Michel’s alleged condition when ICE dropped her off, apparently nowhere near her home. Michel’s attorney and the top official in Allegheny County tell a different story — one of neglect.<\/p>\n
Michel’s attorney gave this statement to Action News 4:<\/p>\n
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“When you release someone like that that far from home, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Murphy said. “And don’t forget, these guys have cars. They were perfectly willing to drive down there to pick her up. They could have easily driven her back to Charleroi. It’s like a 40-minute drive. She would have been in her own environment. She wouldn’t have been sitting around a bus stop in September clothes in February, and she’d be alive now.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Action News 4 also reported a statement from Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato saying, “The death of Ms. Daphy Michel was a tragedy and appears that with a little humanity, it could have been completely avoidable.”<\/p>\n
What happened to Michel is similar to the circumstances of Nurul Amin Shah, another asylum-seeker whose death earlier this year was ruled a homicide<\/a>. Shah, who was blind, was apprehended by immigration officials and later died from hypothermia after officials left him far from home at an upstate New York coffee shop.<\/p>\n
The developing pattern brings to mind a United Nations-backed report from March<\/a> in which the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination determined that “racist hate speech” from President Donald Trump and his allies risked fueling human rights abuses in the U.S.<\/p>\n
For nearly two years now, Haitian immigrants have been targets of vile, racist attacks<\/a> from Trump and others in the MAGA movement. Michel’s death appears to be another example of what happens when federal agents tasked with immigration enforcement operate at the behest of an administration that seems to infuse racism and dehumanization into every aspect of its <\/strong>day-to-day work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Jun. 15, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT Medical examiners ruled the death of a Haitian woman seeking asylum in the U.S. to be a homicide via hypothermia after she was left by federal immigration officers at a Pittsburgh bus shelter in February. According to The Associated Pressthe examiner described Michel as “suffering from untreated severe mental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}