On the night of 26 February this year, the Michel family in Pennsylvania expected to see their loved one, Daphy, again very soon.

After she had spent six months in jail, a judge had dismissed criminal charges against her and one of her brothers was told she would be released soon, probably the next day.

He was worried about her severe mental illness, but was assured that someone would call him so he could pick her up. That was on a Thursday, and that call never came. The next one he received was on Monday, from a Pittsburgh hospital informing him that Daphy Michel, 31, had died.

“At the court, I saw my sister. I saw Daphy. She wasn’t having any problem,” he said through an interpreter in an interview with Pittsburgh’s Action News 4, in which he asked to remain anonymous. He said that Michel came from Haiti to the United States in 2022 hoping to build “a safer life”.

Maintenance workers had raised the alarm when they found her at a bus shelter on Pittsburgh’s South Side, more than 20 miles (32km) away from home and dressed in summer clothes. It was 20F (-6.6C) that morning. She was not breathing and had no discernible pulse, according to the local Port Authority police.

In June, the medical examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide. On Saturday, a lawyer for the family announced their decision to file a lawsuit “very soon” because they want to see justice done.

Michel was a resident of Charleroi and had been living in the US since 2022, having moved to the Pennsylvania community that has a significant Haitian immigrant population.

Many questions remain about her life and death, but advocates say that the combination of lack of attention to mental health issues in detention, negligence in releasing vulnerable detainees and the sometimes informal cooperation among police forces triggered a cocktail of circumstances that ended in tragedy in early March this year.

Much detail from the three days spanning the moment Michel had the criminal charges against her dismissed in court, was arrested by ICE officers and released and then died a lonely death are still unclear. But footage from bus stop cameras released by Pittsburgh Regional Transit and obtained by Pittsburgh’s Public Source show she didn’t move from the bus stop where she was found dead for more than 24 hours.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that ICE processed Michel and placed her in removal proceedings before expected deportation – despite the fact she had a hearing in her asylum case coming up – right after she was released from Washington county jail to the south-west of Pittsburgh.

The DHS then said in a statement on X in June that ICE had “NOTHING to do with this woman’s death” because “she passed away THREE days after ICE encountered her”.

The DHS also said Michel was “an illegal alien from Haiti” and that she was released “with all of her belongings, including a fully charged phone, in sunny weather in the middle of Pittsburgh, where public transport is readily available”. The DHS has not responded to questions from the Guardian regarding this story.

Joseph Murphy, an immigration and civil rights attorney representing members of the Michel family in Pennsylvania, disputes many of those federal claims.

He asserted that “neither her entry nor her presence in the United States were illegal” and that her phone, even if charged, wasn’t of any help because her plan had lapsed while she was in jail.

He emphasized that it was freezing cold that day in Pittsburgh, that the south side of the city can be a “dangerous neighborhood” and, above all, that Michel’s mental illness was “obvious” and, for that reason, she shouldn’t have been left alone in the middle of a city she was unfamiliar with.

“It was a very bad judgment call” by ICE, Murphy said. The attorney also said Michel didn’t speak English, and was illiterate and undereducated.

She had been in jail for six months after suffering a mental health crisis on the street in Charleroi. People familiar with her noted that it had appeared she had refused to bathe during her time behind bars, highlighting the depleted state she must have been in when she was handed from local to federal enforcement and was soon spat out on to the streets of Pittsburgh with a ankle monitor.

“At no point have I seen ICE show concern about people reaching their final destinations [after release from detention]. That hasn’t been the practice under either past or current US administrations,” said Adrianna Torres-García, deputy director of Free Migration Project, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides legal services for immigrants facing deportation.

“Once people leave the detention center or jail where they were held, it’s as if it’s no longer ICE’s responsibility – they don’t worry about anything else, nor do they help them get to their destination, make plans or anything of the sort. Sometimes they just hand them a bus ticket, and that’s it,” they said.

Torres-García added: “When Berks [the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania, a detention center that closed in 2023] was still open, they would do things like hand someone a bus ticket and say: ‘Well, good luck,’ regardless of whether it was summer or winter, or whether the person had family. We were the ones who stepped in, community and grassroots organizations, to pick that person up, find out where they wanted to go and get them to their destination.”

In June, the Allegheny county medical examiner’s office ruled Michel’s death a homicide, saying she was a “vulnerable adult” suffering from “untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier”.

“Based on all available information during the investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms Michel’s death a homicide. A homicide ruling is a standard manner of death determination indicating the death was caused by the actions of another individual. A homicide determination is not to be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt,” Jim Madalinsky, senior public information officer for public safety at the Allegheny county police department, said. Detectives began investigating last month.

Haddy Gassama, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said that ICE releasing people far away from their homes and sometimes without their belongings or medication is something that “happens enough that people have started to flag it”.

“There’s no sort of legal requirement or categorical legal requirement that ICE returns someone exactly to the point of arrest, but the agency is supposed to have discretion on where they’re supposed to drop people, and part of that discretion is that you know they’re supposed to take into account the vulnerability of the person,” Gassama said. “This includes looking at, for example, the weather that day, if this person has any physical or mental issues, where dropping them far away from where they were picked up would cause them any kind of danger. I think this really raises a question around ICE’s own internal practices and the need for stricter guidelines and standards on their practices of release.”

Some members of the Charleroi and Pittsburgh communities wonder to what extent an ugly narrative against Haitians from Donald Trump, close allies and the Make America Great Again (Maga) right wing might have influenced what happened to Michel.

In 2024, in Springfield, Ohio, bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches followed Trump’s false claims of Haitians eating people’s pets, and Charleroi attracted rightwing YouTubers and KKK groups posting recruitment pamphlets on local Facebook groups. Pennsylvania is among the states with the largest population of Haitians, numbering roughly 27,000.

In September 2025, Michel was arrested on misdemeanor charges. According to Pittsburgh’s Public Source, a neighbor witnessed what she believed to be Michel having a mental health crisis, holding a knife and yelling.

Murphy, the attorney, wondered why this incident wasn’t reported until more than 24 hours later. In any case, Michel spent six months in jail before a district judge dismissed criminal misdemeanor charges against her in late February, a period of time behind bars that some advocates consider excessive given the charges.

Also, how she was treated in jail might have been crucial, Gassama said.

Another fact some members of the community can’t get out of their heads is that Michel was alone at the bus stop for many hours without receiving any discernible help.

Jaime Martinez, executive director and founder of Frontline Dignity, an immigrant rights and rapid response organization in Pittsburgh, received a call to the organization’s hotline from somebody near a bus shelter on the night of 1 March. The caller said she had talked to a Haitian woman who seemed to need help. Through Google Translate, she understood that the young woman didn’t speak English and believed that she was going to be picked up to go home. Martinez was out of town at that time and referred the caller to other rapid response numbers. The anonymous caller may have contacted the police, but it’s unclear whether that happened or whether there was a response.

Since then, Martinez has felt devastated that he might have been able to save Michel, although there’s no way to know whether the call was about her.

“I believe that we need to observe all our brothers and sisters as neighbors,” Martinez said. “Because there could have been other people who saw her at that bus stop and who just didn’t think of her like somebody they should help. There were plenty of buses, plenty of people that drove those buses, that saw her for many hours and they did absolutely nothing. We have a responsibility as neighbors, as humans, we need to have a radar to detect what’s going on in our community and in the spaces that we occupy.”

In her obituary, Michel’s family described her as a “person with a kind heart”.

It read: “Since she was a child, she showed great respect, courage and love for everyone. She was always ready to help those who needed her help and her presence brought joy and happiness and light into the lives of all who knew her.”

Her parents, three sisters and two brothers believe they need to find justice for Michel, who was born in 1994 in Aquin, a city in the south of Haiti, who didn’t live to turn 32, attend her immigration hearing or even sleep in her own bed again. The family is grieving and staying private, while many friends aren’t speaking in public out of respect for the family.

Surrounding the Michel family is a broad community of locals and immigrants who recognized Daphy Michel as a neighbor and do not want the case to be forgotten. They have also asked for support for Haitian communities in the US since the supreme court ruled in June that the Trump administration has the right to terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and several thousand Syrians in the US.

Some people are organizing vigils and fundraisers over Michel’s death.

“It is an absolute tragedy that Daphy died,” said Jasmine Rivera, executive director at the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition.

Murphy, the family’s attorney, worked with the community to arrange Michel’s funeral back in March and spoke to the western Pennsylvania outlet TribLive about all the unanswered questions.

He also concluded of Michel: “This person was loved.”