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The recent death of a Costa Rican man who was jailed by US immigration authorities in February before being deported in a vegetative state in September has prompted his family and supporters to speak out with allegations of negligence and inhumane treatment.
Nonetheless, a spokesperson for Donald Trump’s administration – which has aimed to deport as many people as possible from the US since his second presidency started in January – maintained in a statement that the medical treatment Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel received before his death is better than many immigrants “have received in their entire lives”.
The statement from assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that Gamboa “illegally reentered the US – a felony – in December 2024”. Citing information from Gamboa’s family, the Spanish-language news outlet El País reported that he had embarked for the US in search of work, and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him in Texas in February.
Gamboa, 52, initially was held at Texas’s Webb county detention center before being transferred to another facility in the state in Port Isabel. His family said to El País that he called them daily – until he seemingly disappeared without immediate explanation in June.
Eventually, “someone at the detention center said he had a health issue, and that’s why he wasn’t answering us,” Gamboa’s sister, Greidy Mata, told El País. “But they didn’t give us any more information.”
McLaughlin’s statement said “medical professionals diagnosed [Gamboa] with unspecified psychosis and hospitalized him at Valley Baptist Hospital so he could get proper mental health and medical care”.
Gamboa’s family described not being able to find him until August, after they were scammed by two attorneys and then actually located him with the help of a third attorney. By then, Gamboa was bedridden in a vegetative state, and his family’s attorney began the process of having him sent to Costa Rica.
An air ambulance paid for by ICE flew Gamboa to Costa Rica on 3 September, El País wrote. Stricken with encephalopathy, the muscle ailment rhabdomyolysis and the inability to eat on his own, he was admitted to an emergency room in the Costa Rican capital of San José before being transferred to a hospital in his home town of Pérez Zeledón.
Gamboa then died in that hospital on 26 October.
His family has since sought to apply pressure on those in Costa Rica’s government to demand answers from their US counterparts. But Gamboa’s family told El País that they are under the impression that the Costa Rican government is reluctant to get involved beyond “the bare minimum”.
In a video recorded outside Gamboa’s funeral and aired by the Spanish-language news network Univision, his significant other Adriana Ureña said “the medical treatment that Randall got in the United States … in my opinion was terrible”.
One political figure in Costa Rica who has expressed support for Gamboa’s family is the nation’s former president, Óscar Arias, the winner of the 1987 Nobel peace prize.
“Randall Gamboa entered the [US] illegally but in perfect physical condition,” Arias wrote on the social media platform X. Condemning what he called the “complicit silence” of Costa Rica and the US, he added, “Randall’s family deserves to know the truth and to learn what happened when he was in custody of American immigration authorities.”
The Trump administration revoked Arias’s US visa in April, something the two-time Costa Rican president said was done because he oversaw his country’s formalization of relations with China in 2007. Arias, though, said he spoke out about Gamboa because he could not stay silent when “a Costa Rican – a humble Pérez Zeledón municipal worker – was deported in an inhumane condition”.
“I will not shut up when the lives of human beings are jeopardized,” Arias also wrote.
In her statement about Gamboa, McLaughlin contended, “Ensuring the safety, security and wellbeing of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.”
The Trump administration initially insisted that its immigration crackdown would prioritize targeting violent criminals. But government data reported in September showed that immigrants with no criminal record were the largest group in ICE detention.
McLaughlin’s statement about Gamboa noted that illegally re-entering was a felony. The statement also made it a point to say Gamboa had previously been convicted of driving a commercial vehicle without a commercial license as well as fraud, neither of which is a violent offense.
Furthermore, Trump won his second presidency after separate New York state court juries convicted him of criminally falsifying business records as well as committing civil fraud by padding his wealth on financial paperwork given to banks and insurers.
“Under President Trump and [homeland security secretary] Kristi Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,” McLaughlin’s statement said. “Criminal illegal [immigrants] are not welcome in the US.”
Mata said outside Gamboa’s funeral, “The United States needs to realize Randall was not a delinquent – and he was wholly loved. … And he died surrounded by people who loved him.”
