The Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington in August 2024. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger RUTLAND — A Haitian asylum seeker arrived at a Vermont prison having been prescribed psychiatric medication weeks earlier, but prison healthcare providers and outside experts disagreed about the kind of treatment she needed while incarcerated in the state, according to testimony in a federal case that ended Monday when a judge ordered her release. “The list really goes on of times when the signs of mental illness were so obvious, and the facility did nothing,” Eleni Bakst, one of the woman’s lawyers, told a federal court in a hearing here last week. The woman, in her 40s and identified in court documents only by her initials, has spent more than six months in detention, most of it at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in Burlington, according to court documents. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Lanthier ordered the woman released, finding that her prolonged detention without any individualized hearing to justify holding her violated her Fifth Amendment right to due process.  Lanthier ordered that she be released at 3 p.m. Wednesday, enough time, she wrote, for the woman’s lawyers to arrange transportation back to Massachusetts.  The woman’s lawyers had raised questions in court documents and testimony about whether a Vermont prison and the federal government met their constitutional duty to care for a detainee with serious mental illness, arguing their actions amounted to “deliberate indifference.” Lawyers for the federal government and the Vermont Department of Corrections disagreed.  But Lanthier did not decide that question. She ordered the woman released because her detention had simply gone on too long with no process to test whether it was justified. The judge wrote that she was “not considering” the claim that the prison was deliberately indifferent to the woman’s medical needs. The case nonetheless offered rare insight into the nature of mental health treatment at the Burlington facility. A federal hearing last week in Rutland, which ran nearly five and a half hours, revealed how sharply the prison’s mental health providers diverged from outside experts who assessed the same woman and a Department of Corrections staffer who raised concerns about the woman’s mental health. Kasia Brown, who directs mental health care at the prison and works for Wellpath, the state’s prison medical contractor, testified that she received no records of the woman’s past diagnoses or medications. During an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization a few months prior to her arrival at the Vermont facility, the woman had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and anxiety, according to court records.  The woman’s lawyers said that in January they gave ICE documentation of her diagnoses, past prescriptions and recent psychiatric hospitalization, but that ICE appears not to have shared those documents with Wellpath. The woman has not received psychiatric medication since arriving at the South Burlington prison in early February, according to court records. Brown screened the woman in mid-February and wrote in a sworn declaration that no mental health services were clinically indicated, according to court records. Brown testified that in that screening, the woman seemed guarded and gave short answers but denied having any prior mental health issues. Not recognizing one’s own mental illness is a common feature of schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder shares symptoms with schizophrenia, according to the Cleveland Clinic.   In late February, a corrections officer on the woman’s unit submitted an urgent request for a mental health meeting, citing “escalating concerns regarding her mental status and overall safety,” according to court documents. The full request was sealed, but portions of it were quoted in court documents and testimony.   The officer wrote that the woman was refusing to shower, was menstruating through her clothing without addressing it and that meaningful communication had failed. The officer added that the woman’s condition was distressing others on the unit, which raised concerns about the unit’s stability, according to portions of the request quoted in testimony and court documents.  Three days later, an outside clinician, Krista Reincke, met with the woman at her lawyers’ request and diagnosed “unspecified schizophrenia spectrum disorder and other psychotic disorder,” according to portions of Reincke’s evaluation that were quoted in court documents. Reincke noted the woman said she had “a special relationship with God” and was “not of this world” and that Jesus was her lawyer.  Around the same time, Brown testified, another Wellpath clinician met with the woman and reported no signs of mental illness beyond poor hygiene and limited understanding. In medical records quoted in the judge’s ruling, however, the clinician wrote that the evaluation did “indicate the possibility of a MH concern,” using the initials for mental health, although the clinician also wrote that the woman’s “issues” may be in part due to cultural and communication barriers.  Nonetheless, after the concern was raised by the unit officer, the woman was moved to a “mental health” housing unit where there were more prison staff available, Brown testified. The mental health team met weekly with the woman until mid-April, then moved her to monthly meetings, according to court documents and Brown’s testimony.  It’s not clear what the duration or nature of those meetings was. In court documents, the woman’s lawyers described the meetings as ranging “from five to 25 minutes.” Medical records filed as part of the case were not made public.  A second outside clinician, social worker Norma Wassel, reached the same diagnosis as Reincke after meeting the woman by video on June 12. In court testimony, Wassel said the woman told her there were spirits in the room and at times appeared to speak to someone who was not there, behavior that Wassel said went “beyond what would be considered related to that culture, related to that religion,” referring to the woman’s Haitian background. Wassel testified that without treatment, the woman could deteriorate further, testimony the judge cited in her ruling. The road to ICE detention  The woman arrived in the U.S. in June 2024 with her husband and two young children, court documents said. Originally from Haiti, she had been living in Brazil. The family entered on humanitarian parole, and her husband applied for asylum for the family, settling in Chicopee, Massachusetts. In November 2025, she was arrested and involuntarily hospitalized for eight days at a Massachusetts inpatient facility, where she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and severe anxiety and was prescribed several psychiatric medications, including an antipsychotic, according to court documents. About two weeks after her discharge, police responded to a reported domestic disturbance at the family’s apartment. A police report, based partly on statements that were translated from Haitian Creole using unspecified “translation services,” said that according to the woman’s husband, she had scratched and bitten him during an altercation.  She was arrested and arraigned on one count of assault and battery on a household member. The charge was later dismissed, according to court records and her attorney. ICE detained her in mid-December, the day after her arrest.  ICE moved her between facilities in Maine and Massachusetts, court records say, where her lawyers say she was taken off medication and later put back on it, before transferring her to the South Burlington prison in February. The government had first moved to transfer her to Texas, court records showed. After her lawyers objected, it sought to send her to Vermont instead, and a federal court in Massachusetts approved the move while keeping the case under its jurisdiction. “Deliberate indifference” or a “good-faith effort”?  It was only in mid-June, after Brown, the prison’s mental health director, received the woman’s medical records from her inpatient hospitalization, that she referred the woman to a psychiatric nurse practitioner for evaluation, Brown testified. The psychiatric evaluation is expected within weeks, Brown testified, adding that learning of the prior diagnosis did not otherwise change her approach to the woman’s treatment. Brown said in court that she received the medical records in an email about the ongoing court case, which she thought had been sent to her by Brendan Sage, a lawyer representing the Department of Corrections in the case.    In court, the woman’s attorneys argued that the prison and ICE violated the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights by showing “deliberate indifference” to a serious medical need.  Matthew Greer, representing the federal government, said it did not contest the woman’s diagnoses but argued that the facility had shown it could meet her medical needs.  Sage, for the Department of Corrections, argued in court that the facility made a “good-faith” effort and that Brown began to view the woman’s behavior “in a different light” once Brown had the records of the woman’s past hospitalization. In her ruling, Lanthier focused on the length of the detention rather than the quality of the woman’s care.  In addition to the more than six months the woman has already spent in detention, Lanthier raised concerns that if she did not order the woman’s release, the woman could face months more of detention due to her ongoing immigration case. Lanthier also raised concerns that the woman’s mental health could deteriorate if she is not treated.  By the time of the hearing, Lanthier wrote, the criminal charge that led to the woman’s arrest had been dismissed and the government had identified no interest in continuing to hold her and no evidence that she posed a danger or a flight risk. Lanthier set the woman’s release for Wednesday afternoon to allow time for the woman’s lawyer to arrange her transportation back to Massachusetts rather than “forcing (the woman) out into Burlington, Vermont, without means or resources.” Read the story on VTDigger here: A federal judge orders an ICE detainee with mental illness released, finding her six-month detention unconstitutional. ...read more read less