Six days after being transported from a cell at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma to a nearby hospital, a detainee who had been on a hunger strike remains unresponsive, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed on Wednesday. In a press release, ICE stated that the detainee — Mergensana Amar — is on life support.

The press release goes on to detail the events that took place on Thursday, Nov. 15. After Amar was found unresponsive, "medical staff at the detention center immediately called 911 and began efforts to resuscitate him. Amar was rushed to Saint Joseph’s Medical Center in Tacoma, admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit," reads the press release. In its statement, ICE spells the detainee's name Mergensana Amar, but in an interview with Crosscut last month he said his first name was Amar.

According to ICE, Amar had ended his hunger strike last month and was "in good physical health prior to this incident."

"While he refused meals provided by the detention center for a number of days, he began consuming fresh fruit, electrolytes and meal replacement shakes on Sep. 19, consuming sufficient calories to be removed from hunger strike status on October 16," reads the press release.

ICE says it has "endeavored, through the assistance of the Russian Embassy, to identify and contact next of kin. Pursuant to agency policy, ICE will conduct a thorough assessment of this incident.”

On Friday, Crosscut reported that a detainee had died based on a press release issued by the group Latino Advocacy. The activist group stated that a detainee in solitary confinement at the facility watched as paramedics unsuccessfully attempted to revive Amar, a 40-year-old Russian asylum seeker who was the subject of a recent Crosscut report.

In a statement given to a Latino Advocacy attorney and provided to Crosscut, one detainee said, “On November 15, 2018, at 3:30 p.m., about 20 officers from the detention center, from GEO or ICE, came to Amar’s room because he was dead. I saw his body when they took it out of the room.” The statement goes on to give details about the condition of the body and the inmate’s belief that he died three and a half to four hours earlier. There was no indication of the inmate’s ability to make medical judgments about the condition of a body after death.

Maru Mora Villalpando of Latino Advocacy also told Crosscut that members of the group Northwest Detention Center Resistance, or NWDC Resistance, had seen paramedics and the Tacoma Police Department parked at the facility Thursday afternoon.

Officials with GEO Group, the second-largest private prison provider in the country, which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts with to run the Tacoma facility, had described Amar as “unavailable” to members of NWDC Resistance.

Amar hails from Buryatia, a Russian republic in Siberia, just north of Mongolia. He arrived in the United States to seek asylum last December and turned himself in at San Ysidro, a border crossing that sits between Tijuana and San Diego, only to land in the Tacoma detention center a few weeks later. He feared he would lose his life if forced to return home.

With the help of a Russian interpreter, Crosscut spoke to him in October on what was the 47th day of his hunger strike. Asked whether he was hopeful he would be released before his physical health deteriorated, the detainee had replied, “It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to stop.”

Amar explained that back home, Russian skinheads had beaten and threatened him. As evidence of the injuries he had sustained, he pointed to his right hand, where a finger appeared to be permanently dislocated. He also said he had been imprisoned for demonstrating for the independence of Buryatia, which has been under Russian rule since the 17th century.