Marshals Law
A LARGE RECTANGLE of red dirt on the flat expanse of West Texas’ Permian Basin reminds Sadrac Garcia every day of what his family has lost. A few months ago, he could stand on the small porch of his brother Juan’s double-wide and peer into the window of their parents’ trailer a few meters away. Until 2017, three generations of Garcias lived on these couple of acres. The family is slowly selling off the homes and the land, an attempt to move on after their father, Isac Garcia-Wislar, died in the custody of a local jail.
Sadrac, soft-spoken but direct, is tall and solidly built, with a rough goatee and a white cowboy hat. He shows me a photo of his father on this late August afternoon; they look nearly identical. “It’s very sad being here,” he tells me. Sadrac has moved to Odessa, about 20 minutes away. Yesenia Garcia, his mother, is living in Fort Worth with her daughter, Arely. But moving has not helped with moving on. “I never really stop thinking about it, about what happened to him,” says Sadrac.
Isac was 51 when, in March 2017, he was locked up in the Tom Green County Jail, in San Angelo, three hours east. A construction worker and oil field roustabout, Isac had been riding in a cousin’s car when a sheriff’s deputy pulled them over for speeding. The officer purportedly found open bottles of alcohol and two tiny bags of cocaine. Though Isac wasn’t driving and it was not his car, the deputy arrested both men, and because Isac had no identification, the deputy called Border Patrol to report him. While Isac’s cousin, a US citizen, quickly bonded out, Isac was not released. Border officials had placed an immigration hold on him and referred him to federal prosecutors.
Nearly 15 years earlier, Isac had been stopped by border agents on one of his routine crossings between his family’s home in Texas and their ranch in northern Mexico, and been deported. Though he’d lived in the United States for decades, his wife is a green card holder, and his kids are US-born American citizens, that old deportation and his subsequent return to join his family meant he could now be charged with illegal reentry, a federal felony.
As soon as he was charged, Isac became a detainee of the US Marshals Service, an arm of the Department of Justice. In fiscal year 2018, the Marshals held nearly 240,000 people facing federal criminal charges. On any given day, the Marshals hold more people than Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and more than all the county jails of any state except California and Texas. The Marshals run this vast pretrial detention system without owning or operating any jails. Instead, the agency houses its detainees in about 1,100 jails and private facilities around the country. Almost two-thirds of these federal pretrial detainees—who have not been convicted of any crimes—are held in local lockups like Tom Green, typically run by sheriffs. The remainder are held in either privately run jails under contract with the Marshals or federal detention centers run by the Bureau of Prisons, mostly in a handful of large cities.
Due in large part to President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies, the Marshals population is approaching historic highs. About two-thirds of all prosecutions between October 2018 and April 2019 were related to immigration crimes, including many of the people swept up in Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy. In their frantic pursuit of beds, the Marshals have helped prop up failing jails, according to our extensive analysis of government inspections and reports, as well as interviews with current and former Marshals and Justice Department officials.
After four months in Tom Green County Jail, Isac began calling Yesenia and Sadrac repeatedly each day. He said he was weak, in excruciating pain, and getting worse, but the jail wasn’t doing much to help. He asked his family to find a doctor, a lawyer—anyone who might get him the attention he needed.
On July 6, four months after he was arrested, Isac told a jail nurse that he had intense pain in his back and shoulder, and he was short of breath. He was sent to a medical holding cell for more frequent monitoring. The next day, he returned to the infirmary and a nurse wrote in his medical record that he was moaning and grabbing his arm in “extreme pain.” But a supervising nurse, who didn’t personally evaluate Isac, ordered only that he be given ibuprofen. A day later, he was still suffering. Yet another nurse flagged his intensifying pain to a sergeant, asking if Isac should be sent to the Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, which is contracted to provide the jail with medical services and staff, including nurses. The sergeant responded that Isac was malingering, that he’d been complaining of “different illnesses” all week.
Two days later, on his 32nd birthday, Sadrac visited his father. After waiting for several hours in a video visitation booth, Sadrac finally saw Isac and was horrified to find him frail and unable to stand. Sadrac says he asked jail officials if he could bring in a private doctor, but they refused and told him they had his father’s care under control.
Desperate, Sadrac went to the federal courthouse where the Marshals have an office. “If the Marshals are at the top, I thought maybe I could go
