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.
The system dismissed her case. ICE picked her up anyway.
Daphy Michel entered the United States through a Texas port of entry in December 2022 and had pending immigration proceedings at the time of her death. In September 2025, a neighbor called police after she experienced a serious mental health episode. She was arrested on misdemeanor harassment and threat-related charges and booked into Washington County Jail on a $10,000 bond — where she would sit for nearly six months, case after case continued to await a mental health evaluation that reportedly never fully materialized.
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.
The ankle monitor beeped — the next day.
ICE has confirmed one damning detail it apparently cannot explain away: the agency did not receive a tamper alert on Michel’s ankle monitor until March 3 — the day after her body was found, when the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office cut the device off her leg as part of standard intake.
By the time the alert lit up in ICE’s system, Daphy Michel had been dead for approximately 24 hours.
In statements to reporters, ICE has confirmed she was enrolled in ATD with electronic monitoring and that ongoing immigration proceedings were active at the time of her death. The agency has not explained why she was released far from her support network, whether any welfare checks were attempted during the days she was missing, or what release protocols — if any — were followed given her documented mental health history.
“Very close.”
Carlo Michel has said publicly that he and his sister were “very close” — that he had expected to bring her home once her court case was resolved, that he waited after the February 26 hearing for word she’d been freed from county jail, and that no one — not ICE, not local law enforcement, not the county — ever called to tell him what had happened to her.
Immigration attorneys and advocates who have reviewed the case argue that ICE failed a basic duty of care: taking custody of a mentally vulnerable woman, moving her an hour away from her family and community, placing her under electronic monitoring as a nominal substitute for supervision, and then leaving her on a city street with no documented plan for safe transport, housing, or medical follow-up.
As of this week, no formal internal investigation by ICE has been publicly confirmed. Civil rights groups and immigrant justice organizations are demanding inquiries from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility and outside oversight bodies. Advocates are also pressing local and federal authorities to release full records from the jail, ICE, transit police, and the medical examiner.
Much Still Unclear
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner has not yet released an official cause or manner of death. What happened to Daphy Michel in the five days between her ICE release and her death — where she slept, whether she sought help, whether anyone saw her — remains publicly unknown.
Whether ICE or any agency will face disciplinary or legal consequences is also unresolved.
What is known: a woman was handed from one government entity to another, released alone onto an unfamiliar street in a city far from her family, and found dead days later at a bus shelter — still wearing the bracelet the government put on her to keep tabs on her whereabouts.
The bracelet beeped. No one came.
Credit Where Due: Read more about Daphy at WTAE Pittsburgh. Their newsroom has really been on point in covering this brutal immigration news story.
