The Lonesome Death of Daphy Michel

Pablo Manríquez, Migrant Insider

The Haitian woman, 31, dies alone at Pittsburgh bus stop days after ICE released her to the streets far from home to perish. Rest in power, miss.

WASHINGTON — Daphy Michel was 31 years old, she had a brother who loved her, and she had just had her criminal charges thrown out of court.

Five days later, she was dead at a Pittsburgh bus stop — alone, unresponsive, still wearing her ICE ankle monitor.

Michel, a Haitian asylum seeker living in Washington County, Pennsylvania, was found by maintenance workers on the morning of March 2 at a bus shelter near the Monongahela Incline on East Carson Street in Pittsburgh’s South Side. Pittsburgh Regional Transit police attempted CPR, a defibrillator, and Narcan before transporting her to UPMC Presbyterian Hospital. She was later pronounced dead. Cardiac arrest, doctors told her family. An official cause of death from the Allegheny County Medical Examiner is still pending.

She had been released on the streets of Pittsburgh — roughly an hour from her home, in a city unfamiliar to her — by ICE agents five days earlier.

Her brother, Carlo Michel, a Haitian immigrant living legally in Washington County under Temporary Protected Status, found out his sister was dead when a hospital called to ask if he recognized her name.

[…]

On February 26, 2026, a judge dismissed both misdemeanor counts. Carlo left the courthouse believing his sister was coming home.

She never made it.

An ICE detainer was waiting in her jail file. The Washington County Public Defender’s Office confirmed that ICE used the detainer to intercept her release from county custody and transfer her directly into federal hands. The following day — February 27 — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Pittsburgh enrolled her in its Alternatives to Detention program and strapped an ankle monitor to her leg.

Then they let her go. On the street. In Pittsburgh. Without notifying her brother. Without contacting her legal representatives.

Read about Michel’s story.

This isn’t the only way Trump’s administration has jeopardized the lives of Haitians.

More breaking Black news.