by Chuck Sharman

In March 2026, after what was likely the first-ever civil sanction against a private prison company for spoliation of evidence, CoreCivic settled a suit filed over the suicide of a Brazilian migrant at the company’s Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF), a lockup operated under contract for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Estancia, New Mexico.

According to the complaint filed on his behalf, Kelsey Vial, 23, presented himself to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol upon arrival in the country in April 2022 and asked for asylum. He was turned over to ICE and held at TCDF to await an immigration court hearing on his asylum request. Though he confessed to experiencing suicidal ideation as a 14-year-old during an interview with a CoreCivic mental health practitioner, Vial was placed in the prison’s general population.

His asylum request was quickly denied, and a final order for his removal from the country was issued on June 13. Two days later, in a follow-up interview with the same CoreCivic Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Reev Pierce, the detainee said “that he was crying a lot, he was having trouble sleeping, and he was engaged in self-harm—he had hurt his hand with a spoon,” the complaint recalled. Vial also told Pierce that he had “a history of self-mutilation.” Yet the LPC did not adjust the housing recommendation for Vial.

The following day, on June 16, he told CoreCivic psychiatrist Dr. Christopher Clancy “that he felt depressed, was having trouble sleeping, lacked appetite, and was having crying spells,” the complaint continued. Vial also said “that sometimes he was having suicidal ideation and was thinking about hanging himself or jumping from the second floor.” Clancy prescribed a psychotropic medication, Zoloft, “which is known to increase the risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation for individuals in [Vial’s] age group.”

Two days later, Vial told Pierce that he was waking four or five times a night. Clancy upped his dosage of Zoloft shortly after that. Less than two weeks passed before Vial told Pierce that he had been assaulted by fellow detainees. Shortly thereafter—three months after arriving at TCDF—Vial was whisked by plane to Texas for removal to Brazil, only to be taken off the flight and returned to TCDF, with no explanation. Crucially, he was off his psychotropic medication for three days.

Now persistently agitated over his continued incarceration, Vial appeared to decompensate rapidly over the next three weeks. During a mental health assessment, another CoreCivic LPC, Jutta Fournier, “noted that he endorsed violent or homicidal ideation and that he had increased anxiety,” along with “a history of victimization.” Fournier determined that the detainee was suffering from an “[a]bnormal emotional response to … incarceration.” However, Vial spent only the first two days of August on suicide watch.

By August 17, he was messaging his ICE deportation officer, “[F]or God’s sake … I have a problem with [a]nxiety and depression, it’s been 4 months since I’ve been in prison, I can’t stand it More [sic].” The deportation officer went to the kitchen where Vial was assigned to work, “concerned about his access to knives.” Vial also refused a shaving razor, worrying that he’d use it to hurt himself. Yet still he did not get “a full suicide risk assessment or evaluation of his mental health condition.”

That afternoon, an unnamed guard let Vial retrieve a bed sheet from his cell and take it into another cell, locking the detainee inside by himself. He was found unresponsive and hanging from it 30 minutes later. Emergency responders transported him to a hospital, where he died on August 24.

With the aid of attorneys with the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Coyle & Benoit, PLLC in El Paso, Texas, a suit was filed in September 2023 in the state’s First Judicial Circuit Court for Santa Fe County by the personal representative of Vial’s estate, Joleen K. Youngers. The complaint made state-law claims for negligence and medical negligence against CoreCivic and its employees.

Importantly, on the day that Vial died, the attorneys sent CoreCivic a demand to maintain evidence related to his death, including surveillance video footage. But CoreCivic ignored that request. Instead, its employees pulled 49 still shots from the video to accompany a timeline that they constructed to absolve the firm of liability for the death. Footage from 14 of 15 cameras in use that day was then lost when the company overwrote it with later surveillance video.

The ACLU filed a motion for sanctions. CoreCivic attorneys insisted that jurors would have “all the evidence they need,” according to a review by The Intercept of audio recording from the December 2025 motion hearing. But Judge Francis J. Mathew said, “That’s a question I’m not sure we can answer without that video.” He determined that the company had engaged in spoliation of evidence and sanctioned CoreCivic with an adverse inference instruction, telling jurors that they could assume the missing evidence would support the Plaintiff’s claims.

It was “the first known incident of a private prison corporation being held responsible in a wrongful death lawsuit for destroying video or other evidence related to immigration detainees dying in custody,” The Intercept declared. The sanction was also apparently sufficient to get CoreCivic to the settlement table; the parties filed a notice of settlement with the district court on December 24, 2025, and the ACLU announced an agreement had been finalized on March 19, 2026. Its terms and conditions, however, were kept confidential. See: Youngers v. CoreCivic, N.M. 1st Jud. Dist. (Santa Fe Cty.), Case No. D-101-CV-2022-01722.  

Additional source: The Intercept