By Noah Lanard, June 15, 2020, Mother Jones
He’d survived cancer and kidnapping. Now he was up against Trump and the pandemic.
On April 13, Raúl Luna González told his sister Margarita Albarrán Luna that he was trying to hide symptoms of COVID-19 from the staff of the Louisiana immigration detention center where he was being held. People with fevers at the Richwood Correctional Center were being moved to solitary confinement while they awaited test results. Luna had survived too much to risk dying alone in a cell: colon cancer, a kidnapping in Mexico, and a year in detention, a grim milestone he’d just passed.
Hours after I first talked to Luna, Lieutenant Stanton Johnson became the second Richwood employee to die after contracting COVID-19. Johnson had often done favors for Luna and sat down on his bunk to chat. Johnson told Luna he was sorry about how the detainees were being treated at Richwood. He called Luna “counsel” out of respect for time he spent in law school in Mexico.
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