ICE denied Greggy Sorio medical care for months at Tacoma detention facility, causing partial foot amputations

Greggy Sorio, a 37-year-old lawful permanent resident from the Philippines, was transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma in February 2025 after completing a state prison sentence in Alaska. Beginning around July 2025 he repeatedly reported blood in his stool, abdominal pain, and jaundice; detention staff denied his requests for a hospital referral for more than a month and, at one point, ignored his "screams and cries of pain for three hours," according to a federal judge's later account of the record. By late October 2025 Sorio could barely walk; when he was finally hospitalized on October 22, doctors diagnosed a bone infection and performed two amputation surgeries, and separately treated him for ulcerative colitis, acute blood-loss anemia, and severe unintended weight loss.

ICE continued to pursue Sorio's deportation despite his condition. He was pulled off a deportation flight at Sea-Tac International Airport in early December 2025 after advocates alerted the airline to his medical status, and a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order days later blocking his removal. Sorio's attorney, Louise Carhart, said the appropriate response to the medical neglect he suffered was immediate release from custody.

Updates

2026-02-13 — Federal judge ordered Sorio's release, finding the facility's medical care unconstitutional [1, 2]

U.S. District Judge Tana Lin of the Western District of Washington ordered ICE to release Sorio after finding that "objectively unreasonable failures" in his medical care at the Northwest ICE Processing Center more likely than not caused his permanent disability, including the loss of a toe and part of his foot. Lin ruled that the facility's treatment of Sorio violated the Constitution and that immediate release was the only adequate remedy. An ICE spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling. Sorio was released from the Tacoma facility the same day, though he still faced the underlying deportation order.

2026-02-20 — ICE deported Sorio to the Philippines days after his release [5]

ICE denied Sorio's stay-of-removal request "the weekend before his deportation" and removed him to the Philippines on a wheelchair, roughly a week after Judge Lin's release order. Lin's ruling addressed only the constitutionality of his detention and medical treatment; it did not disturb the underlying removal order, which ICE had already been pursuing since an October 2025 immigration court ruling and had tried once before, in early December 2025, before advocates had him pulled from a Sea-Tac departure. Advocates said they would continue seeking to overturn the deportation itself. Two other sources reporting on the deportation (TEGNA affiliates KING 5/KGW/KENS 5; Rappler) returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch and were not independently verified for this entry.