ICE

Afghan Special Forces Veteran Died in ICE Custody After Officers Denied Him an Inhaler

The death certificate blames an adverse drug reaction and meth. His family calls that impossible.

Beth Bailey | 7.7.2026 4:05 PM

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(Photos courtesy of #AfghanEvac | Illustration: Adani Samat)

On the morning of March 13, Afghan immigrant Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal was taken into custody while preparing to take his children to school. His wife told Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that Paktiawal required an inhaler to breathe. She said officers did not take the inhaler and did not allow her to provide it later. Within 24 hours, the former Afghan National Army Special Operations Command soldier was dead.

Paktiawal began to experience shortness of breath shortly after arriving at an ICE detention center. When he called his brother, Naseer Paktiawal, to alert him to his condition, his brother reported a medical emergency at the detention center. Paktiawal was taken to Parkland Hospital at 11:30 p.m. He was stabilized, but began to experience swelling of his tongue as he ate breakfast. He died forty minutes later, around 9 a.m. His family was not alerted to his death until noon.

It took more than three months following Paktiawal's death for the Dallas Medical Examiner to release any more details, listing his cause of death in an online database as an "accident." 

Though an autopsy has not been forthcoming, a death certificate, shared with Reason, shows that Paktiawal's immediate cause of death was anaphylaxis, "complicating acute asthma exacerbation." The death certificate further describes Paktiawal's time and place of injury as 11:30 P.M. at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas on March 12, which was almost 12 hours prior to his arrest on March 13. They say that the injury occurred in the aftermath of "adverse drug reaction and ingestion of [an] illicit drug." The certificate notes "toxic effects of methamphetamine" in addition to "atherosclerotic........

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