An immigration detainee who was held at Miami Correctional Facility claims the prison’s for-profit health contractor failed to provide his epilepsy medication, causing him to suffer a head injury from a seizure that left him lying in a “pool of blood.”
Then, later that day, guards at the facility pepper sprayed him without justification.
Those are the allegations in a pair of lawsuits Andranik Grigoryan filed against Centurion Health, the state’s prison medical contractor, and unidentified guards at the prison.
Grigoryan alleges in the federal lawsuits that Centurion failed to provide adequate staffing to care for immigrant detainees at the prison. As a result, Grigoryan, who has been prescribed pills for epilepsy since 2020, frequently missed his anti-seizure medication.
On Jan. 22, less than a month after he arrived at Miami Correctional, Grigoryan suffered a “severe seizure,” his first in nearly a year, according to the complaint. He hit his head during the episode and was taken to a local hospital after prison staff found him in his cell, lying in a pool of blood.
A separate lawsuit against unnamed Indiana Department of Correction officers alleges that after Grigoryan got back from the hospital later that day, officers went to his cell and demanded that he pack up his belongings so they could move him to another housing unit. Grigoryan stood next to the locked cell door to ask the officers why he was being moved. The officers opened a rectangular opening on the cell normally used to pass food trays and doused Grigoryan with pepper spray, according to the complaint.
“What happened to Mr. Grigoryan was cruel and unconstitutional,” Ken Falk, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said in a statement. “He had gone nearly a year without a seizure, but staff failed to give him the medication that kept them under control. From then on, he had to worry every day that it would happen again. To then pepper-spray him while he was still injured is indefensible.”
The ACLU of Indiana filed the lawsuits on Grigoryan’s behalf on July 27 in federal court in Indianapolis.
A spokeswoman for IDOC said the agency does not “have a statement at this time.” Centurion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A recent IndyStar investigation found that Miami Correctional and Centurion were woefully unprepared for the influx of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees, who began arriving at the facility in October 2025 as part of a deal that Gov. Mike Braun had reached with the Trump administration. Staffing shortages led to massive medical care backlogs, far above the limits set in the company’s $1 billion contract with the state. The human consequence, in the case of two other immigrant detainees, was fatal, according to a family attorney, detainees and a nurse.
As the backlogs soared to the hundreds, Centurion reported significantly lower numbers to the state, according to interviews with nurses and internal emails obtained by IndyStar. The company reported no backlogs at all over several months — an implausible scenario, according to multiple nurses who saw the discrepancy as an attempt to hide the severity of the crisis. One nurse called the backlog data Centurion send to the state “crazy fake.”
Following IndyStar’s investigation, Braun directed IDOC to “fully review” claims of massive medical backlogs and severe staffing shortages. The governor’s press secretary, Griffin Reid, said in a July 24 statement that an “internal audit is underway.” He did not say what, precisely, the audit will cover or when it’s expected to be completed.
ICE and Braun’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding Grigoryan’s lawsuits. Neither were named as defendants.
Grigoryan arrived at Miami Correctional on Dec. 30, 2025 and was released on May 15, after a federal judge granted his habeas corpus petition, a type of lawsuit that ICE detainees have used, many successfully, to challenge the lawfulness of their detention.
Grigoryan was born in Uzbekistan when it was part of the Soviet Union. In earlier interviews with IndyStar, including while he was detained, he said he and his family came to the United States on a tourist visa in the late 1990s. They later sought and received asylum in 2000, when Grigoryan was still a child. In 2022, Grigoryan lost his asylum status after a fraud conviction and he was sentenced to a year in federal prison.
After he finished his sentence, he was transferred to the custody of immigration officials. He was first detained at Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a GEO Group-owned ICE detention center in Pennsylvania, and then at Miami Correctional.
“I understand I committed a crime,” Grigoryan, who has been living in New York, told IndyStar. “I paid for it.”
According to his lawsuit, he was prescribed the anti-seizure pill Keppra and he was supposed to take them twice a day, once in the morning and again in the evening. At Miami Correctional, Grigoryan initially received his medication during breakfast, between 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., and again at dinner between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. But, the complaint alleges, Centurion frequently had no staff to pass out medication to detainees.
On Jan. 21, Grigoryan received his evening dose, but not his morning dose the next day. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Jan. 22, Grigoryan had a seizure and was taken to the hospital, where his head wound from his fall was treated. The confrontation with the unnamed correctional officers happened after he got back from the hospital later that day.
According to the complaint, the officers, whose identities he does not know, sprayed him directly in his eyes, handcuffed him and took him out of his cell as his eyes were still burning.
“Mr. Grigoryan had not had any significant disciplinary issues at Miami, and certainly had never acted in a way that justified staff spraying him with OC spray…,” according to the complaint. “Mr. Grigoryan did not threaten the officers or forcibly resist them. He just asked why he was being moved.”
Two ICE detainees have died at Miami Correctional.
Lorth Sim, a Cambodian national, died on Feb. 16, six weeks after he was transferred to the prison. Sim, a 59-year-old Type 2 diabetic, was prescribed metformin to control his blood sugar levels. But Sim never received the medication, a former Centurion nurse told IndyStar. An independent autopsy commissioned by his family found significant levels of glucose in his blood.
Tuan Van Bui, a Vietnamese national, died six weeks later, on April 1. Unlike Sim, Bui, 55, was receiving medication for his health problems, including hypertension, according to an ICE detainee death report. But two detainees who saw him collapse said help arrived too late.
IndyStar reporter Alexandria Burris contributed to this story.
Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at kphillips@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Prison failed to give ICE detainee meds, pepper sprayed him after seizure, suit says
Reporting by Kristine Phillips, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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By Kristine Phillips, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
