#Canadian in ICE facility dies of COVID-19 days before deportation

A 72-year-old Canadian man has died from complications due to the coronavirus after being held in a crowded US immigration detention center — where more than 90 percent of detainees had contracted the illness, reports say.

James Hill died Wednesday night at a hospital in Virginia, a month after he was scheduled to fly to Canada, the Globe and Mail reports.

Hill, a former doctor awaiting deportation after illegally writing scripts for Oxycontin, was sent to the privately run Virginia facility in April — but was stuck in there due to bureaucratic delays, the report says.

Days before he was slated to fly home — and after telling family he was concerned about catching COVID-19 while sleeping in a dorm with more than 80 other men because of his age — he was hospitalized with the coronavirus.

The Farmville Detention Center has made headlines during the pandemic for its widespread infection rates, allegedly due to overcrowding and sanitation issues, a local ABC network reports.

The conditions were apparently so dangerous, Gov. Ralph Northam and Virginia’s two US senators wrote President Trump late last month, requesting that the CDC be sent in, according to ABC 8.

According to ICE’s website, 290 of the 312 people housed in the facility have tested positive for COVID-19.

The former doc had served 12 years for giving out the painkillers without seeing the patients in Louisiana, reports say.

Relatives decried his treatment, saying “their negligence they let him die,” the Globe and Mail reports.

“We were all waiting for him to come back, we had made all the arrangements,” Douglas Hunt, a nephew of Hill, told the paper.

With Hill’s death, a total of 17 people have died in ICE custody since last September, the start of the agency’s fiscal year, reports say.