A Liberian-born double amputee was thrown into solitary confinement at a Georgia immigration detention center after refusing to enter his flooded cell — a move that could have destroyed his battery-powered prosthetic legs and left him unable to walk, according to a report.
Rodney Taylor spent three days in a “restrictive housing unit” at Stewart detention center after guards tried to force him into a cell with an inch of standing water. For Taylor, whose microprocessor-controlled prosthetic legs cannot get wet, entering that cell would have been catastrophic, The Guardian reported.
“They don’t see you as an individual, but as someone being deported,” Taylor told The Guardian, which first exposed his case in April.
The 46-year-old barber has lived in the U.S. nearly his entire life after arriving from Liberia as a child on a medical visa. He underwent 16 operations and has only two fingers on his right hand.
ICE detained Taylor in January — just 10 days after he got engaged and days before he was scheduled to receive new prosthetics — over a teenage burglary conviction that Georgia pardoned in 2010. He has a pending green card application.
Since his detention, Taylor’s suffering has been relentless. The screws in his prosthetic legs came loose, causing him to fall and injure his hand. When he finally got an appointment for new prosthetics in May, the clinic didn’t have a battery charger. A follow-up appointment in July failed because clinic staff weren’t familiar with his prosthetic model.
“I am afraid for Rodney,” his fiancée Mildred Pierre wrote to Senator Jon Ossoff’s office after the solitary confinement incident.
During his three days in isolation, Taylor received no drinking water and couldn’t charge his prosthetic batteries, Pierre said. CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd claimed the facility doesn’t use “solitary confinement” but “restrictive housing units” — a distinction experts say is meaningless.
When Senator Raphael Warnock’s staff visited Taylor, the warden watched through a glass window and cut the meeting short after just 15 minutes.
“I only had time to answer two or three questions,” Taylor said.
Fellow detainees rallied to Taylor’s defense during the solitary incident, blocking guards from entering his cell and demanding, “How could y’all do that to him? He’s a good guy.”
Taylor faces a crucial immigration hearing on August 12 that will determine if he’s deported.
“I gotta make sure I can be able to walk when I get out of here,” he said.