In this lawsuit, the children of Kamyar Samimi seek to hold the Geo Group accountable for the wrongful death of their father. Mr. Samimi, a Legal Permanent Resident, died in December 2017, after two weeks in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility, a for-profit detention center operated by GEO. The ACLU of Colorado’s investigation, which required a lawsuit to force ICE to release records under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed a gut-wrenching picture of his final days and reflected the inhumane conditions and lack of adequate medical care at ACDF.
On the first day of Mr. Samimi’s detention, GEO’s solitary full-time physician, following GEO policy, ordered that Mr. Samimi be abruptly cut off from the methadone he’d been taking legally for 20 years. The lawsuit alleges that the order was medically unjustifiable, caused life-threatening and tortuously painful opioid withdrawal, and that Mr. Samini failed to receive appropriate medical care as his condition deteriorated.
The ICE internal review of Mr. Samini’s death, which was released in response to the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit, found numerous violations of ICE standards. The ICE documents were featured in an ACLU of Colorado investigative report, Cashing In On Cruelty, that detailed numerous stories of medical neglect and incompetence at GEO, as well as substandard care that contributed to the suffering and death of Samimi.
In 2020, the matter came to resolution through settlement terms that the parties agreed to keep confidential.
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