ICE and GEO Group denied diabetic detainee Elton Purvis insulin and care, causing repeated hospitalizations at Pearsall facility

On May 13, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Elton Purvis — a 55-year-old legal permanent resident from Trinidad and Tobago and a Type 1 diabetic — at Boston Logan International Airport as he returned from a trip to attend two of his sons' graduations, and confiscated his prescription insulin and malaria medication without allowing him to take either; according to a Federal Tort Claims Act claim filed by the ACLU of Texas, ICE agents also ignored symptoms of malaria he was suffering from for the first 12 days of his custody before treating him. Purvis was hospitalized at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen, Texas, for hyperglycemia and dehydration on June 2, 2025, the first of at least three hospitalizations documented during his seven-month detention.

Purvis spent most of his detention at the GEO Group-run South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas, where he was hospitalized a second time around June 9, 2025 for hypoglycemia and a third time on June 19, 2025 at Frio Regional Hospital in Pearsall. Guards repeatedly dismissed his pleas for help, on one occasion ignoring a nurse who had asked that he be taken to the facility's medical unit. Purvis, a Rastafarian priest whose religious and medical dietary needs required a vegetarian, allergen-free diet compatible with his diabetes, was served meals containing meat that staff said they could not adjust, and relied on other detainees' leftover cornbread to stave off hypoglycemic episodes; he also filtered the facility's contaminated drinking water himself. He filed more than 100 grievances to ICE over the course of his detention, none of which produced a response. ICE deported Purvis in December 2025.

Updates

2026-07-30 — ACLU of Texas filed $10M federal claim over the neglect [1, 2]

The ACLU of Texas filed a Federal Tort Claims Act administrative claim against the federal government on Purvis's behalf, seeking $10 million in damages for negligence, medical negligence, abuse of process, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The claim was one of 53 filed by ACLU affiliates across 17 states and Washington, D.C. the same day; a DHS spokesperson told the Texas Tribune that Purvis had prior convictions and declined further comment, citing pending litigation.