Family of Gabriel Johnson says he suffered stroke in ICE custody: ‘We’ve been trying to do it the right way’

Gabriel Johnson’s children say they are seeking an emergency stay of removal as they push for his release to a rehabilitation facility.

Gabri Johnson woke up unusually early on the morning of July 15. Beyond that, she had no reason to suspect that just before 9 a.m., she would receive a phone call from her mother that would upend the family’s life. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had just arrived at their Cary, North Carolina, home and taken her 55-year-old father, Gabriel Johnson, into custody.

“Don’t panic,” she recalled her mother saying in a gentle voice when she picked up. “ICE just came to the house and took your pa.”

A refugee from Liberia with a history of minor strokes dating back to 2020, Gabriel has legally lived in the United States since he was 15 years old. While he has maintained legal status, he never became a U.S. citizen. His family says they were initially told his detention stemmed from a potential misunderstanding around a missed immigration appointment before later learning officials were pursuing his removal under a broader change in federal immigration policy.

Sixteen days later, the family’s worst fears became reality. After first being held at an ICE holding facility in Cary before spending roughly two weeks at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, where relatives say he repeatedly told them he was being denied consistent access to food, water, and his stroke medication, Gabriel was transferred to Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. According to his family, he suffered a stroke there on July 30 that has left the left side of his body paralyzed.

“I got a call from the hospital in Texas today saying that my father was rushed there after having a stroke,” Johnson, 30, said in a video she uploaded to social media on Thursday. “Like he’s been telling them, give me my medication, give me food, give me water. They laughed at him. They refused. My father had a stroke in the left side of his body is completely paralyzed right now. ICE is fully responsible for this.”

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While speaking to theGrio by phone on Friday morning, Johnson said, though she’s a frequent poster online herself, speaking publicly wasn’t the family’s first choice. Her father is intensely private, she said, and for more than two weeks, they tried to navigate the situation behind the scenes on their own through attorneys and the courts. His stroke changed everything.

Now, she’s asking the public to help amplify her father’s story as the family races to secure medical care, halt his removal, and reunite with him while he recovers. They have filed an emergency stay of removal, hoping to keep Gabriel in the United States long enough to receive treatment and begin rehabilitation before any deportation proceedings move forward.

“We’ve been trying to do it the right way through even conceding and thinking that we could maybe move to Africa and just make the best out of that and make it a beautiful life,” Johnson explained. “But now that his health care rights and his human rights have been impeded beyond, and we have to fight to get him treatment to not be permanently disabled, hopefully, or to get him a standard of living within his home that he’s familiar with to adjust to this. Like we have to. This is the new plan.”

Since the day he was detained, Johnson said the family has spent nearly every waking hour calling attorneys, gathering medical records, and responding to each new development. Before suffering the stroke, she said her father repeatedly told them he was growing weaker while at Stewart Detention Center, claiming he was being denied adequate access to food, water, and medication despite repeatedly informing officials about his medical history and previous strokes.

She also said he described being transported overnight from Stewart Detention Center to a military base, where he and dozens of other detainees were allegedly kept handcuffed inside a dark warehouse without any idea of where they were or what would happen next. According to Johnson, her father was nearly placed on a deportation flight despite having an emergency federal court hearing scheduled for the following morning. He was removed from one flight, she said, but was nearly forced onto a second before someone intervened and returned him to Stewart while his legal challenge continued.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately return theGrio’s request for comment.

“I am sharing my father’s story because this is not just our family’s nightmare,” she wrote in the caption of her post. “It is a human rights issue. If anyone has legal resources, media contacts, advocacy connections, or any way to help bring my father home, please reach out.” 

After the emergency hearing failed to stop his removal, Johnson said ICE transferred her father from Georgia to Prairieland Detention Center in Texas even though his attorneys were still seeking a stay of removal. She alleges he was given little food or water during the transfer and suffered a stroke the morning he was expected to be removed from the United States. Since the stroke, communicating with him has become even more challenging. Johnson said a nurse at the Texas hospital where he was taken after experiencing the medical emergency called so the two could speak, but ICE agents prevented the phone from being handed to him because they feared he could reveal his hospital room location.

“That is how dire the situation is,” she expressed in her video. This is not love. This is not care. This is not America. It’s torture, and they’re trying to not only take people out of their homes and break up families, they’re trying to kill them on the way there.” 

While speaking with theGrio she added, “They made his health and his mental strength extremely weak on purpose, and took away a lot of his humanity in this entire experience.” 

Through it all, Johnson said her family has leaned on one another and on the legacy of the man they know their father to be. Married to their mother for 30 years, Gabriel is the father of four, a devoted Christian who has spent years serving rural North Carolina through HIV/AIDS education, community outreach, and food drives. She described him as the kind of father who still drops off home-cooked meals at his adult children’s homes, insists on Sunday family dinners that he cooks himself and can recite entire passages of the Bible from memory. Earlier this year, she recalled a family trip to Hawaii to celebrate her turning 30 and he turning 55, since their birthdays are within six days of each other, a memory that couldn’t help but make her smile and chuckle.

“Gabriel is a really special father,” Jonson said. “And he’s incredibly smart. He graduated from North Carolina Central University magna cum laude.”

Every time the family receives another update, she said, they gather to make a new plan. At one point, they even discussed selling the family home and relocating to Ghana or wherever Gabriel might ultimately be sent. Their mother, who also fled Liberia as a child before becoming a U.S. citizen, raised them to remain deeply connected to their West African roots, making the possibility of moving there, while heartbreaking, not unimaginable.

Johnson said she has continued meeting with her therapist throughout the ordeal while grappling with anxiety over what this experience has done to her and her family’s sense of self. Moments of normalcy have become difficult. Johnson and her siblings had gone to see the new “Spider-Man” movie, hoping for a brief distraction, when she received a phone call from the hospital telling her that her father had suffered a stroke. They immediately left the theater. Later that night, with her mother’s blessing, she recorded the video that has since reached millions of people online.

“I started to get this anxiety that maybe there are a lot more people who don’t want us here than than we imagined,” she noted, adding, “This outpouring of love has helped to just reassure that that we do belong here, and that the people who are in ICE custody deserve healthcare and humanity.”

Now, the family is traveling to Texas, hoping to meet with attorneys, advocate directly for Gabriel’s care, and ensure he is released to a rehabilitation facility rather than returned to ICE custody.

Johnson said she’s ultimately speaking out not only for her father, but for the countless other families navigating immigration since the Trump Administration’s crackdown began. She hopes greater attention will shine a light on what families are really experiencing behind the scenes—from scrambling to prevent deportation flights to medical emergencies to lost communication with loved ones—and push for greater transparency for those still inside ICE detention.

“We want people to know and be able to expect clearly what’s happening to their families, so that they can, and we can begin to demand more out of those circumstances,” she said. “I want so much reform around this, and we all do as a family. We’ll just say like, ‘Oh, ICE is gonna be so good to people when we’re done with them.’”