“Murder, Heart Attacks, Suicide, COVID—Immigrants Are Dying in “America’s Waiting Room.””

Austin Kocher, research assistant professor in the Newhouse School with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), was quoted in the Mother Jones story “Murder, Heart Attacks, Suicide, COVID—Immigrants Are Dying in “America’s Waiting Room.”” Kocher, an expert on federal immigration detention and the immigration court system, has studied “death while waiting,” which refers to how the U.S. government plays a role in the death of immigrants by simply doing nothing. “If someone has been deported and killed, there definitely is some moral and ethical culpability on the United States for having done that,” Kocher says.