Family Blames ICE, Ankle Monitor for Student’s Death

A 20-year-old Ohio college student who immigrated from Haiti was killed on Monday after stepping into interstate traffic, and his family says the pressure of looming deportation pushed him there. Authorities say Pierre Damas Bel parked along I-70 in Springfield, then walked into the westbound lanes, where a tractor-trailer struck and killed him, reports the Washington Post. State authorities are investigating.

Bel had lived in the US under temporary protected status, which the Trump administration moved to end for Haitians. After a recent ICE appointment, he’d been fitted with a GPS ankle monitor that he said left him ashamed and humiliated, per an Instagram post. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote online at the end of July. His father said classmates mocked him, he was excluded from his JROTC uniform handout, and he wasn’t able to play soccer due to the weight of the GPS tracker.

Bel’s dad says he got a call from his distraught son shortly before his death and begged him to come home to talk. Then, “the police showed at my door to report that my son threw himself under a truck,” he said in a statement cited by NBC News. “People’s lives … are being reduced to political pawns,” one advocate said at a presser regarding Bel’s death, per WKYC. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has come down on the Trump administration before for its immigration policies, called it a “horrible tragedy,” per NBC. “We have to ask ourselves: Is this really good?” DeWine said. “Do we want that being done in our name?”

Bel’s family is now mourning the oldest of three siblings, who graduated with honors from high school this past spring, was working at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant, and had just started at Wright State University, with plans to study neuroscience, per the Cincinnati Enquirer. ICE, meanwhile, issued a statement after Bel’s death, not commenting on those details, but instead noting that “no one is required to stay in the United States illegally and wear a monitor,” because they can self-deport, per WSYX. “Remaining in the country illegally, while fighting removal, is a choice.”