Washington Post Provides Excellent Reporting On Immigration Issue

The Washington Post has been doing an excellent job covering immigration-related issues. Eristic Ragemail has been lax in putting hyperlinks to their articles but we will attempt to rectify that oversight in this posting. Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein stand out for their tenacious reporting. We encourage our good readers to check out the Post’s website and catch up on some really insightful reading.

Immigration raid spurs calls for action vs. owners

By DAVID PITT

The Associated Press
Sunday, June 1, 2008; 1:48 PM

DES MOINES, Iowa -- After the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history, hundreds of workers have been sentenced but not one company official as yet faces any charges _ something critics say is typical of a federal government that is tough on employees but easy on owners.

Worker advocates and lawmakers say the fact that nearly 400 workers were arrested in the May 12 raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville _ or more than one-third of the total number of employees _ proves that company officials must have known they were hiring illegal immigrants….

"I'll be interested to see if federal authorities will be bringing any charges against the employer," Braley said in a telephone interview.

Braley has questioned the cost of the Postville raid as well as an operation at Swift & Co. plants in Marshalltown and five other Midwest cities in 2006. Although federal agents arrested about 1,300 workers in raids at the Swift plants, Braley noted that no top company officials were charged. [Full Story contained at link below]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/01/AR2008060101059.html

Arizona's Immigration Two-Step

By Lee Hockstader

Monday, April 21, 2008; Page A15

PHOENIX -- Traumatized by a tidal wave of illegal immigrants, Arizona last year enacted the nation's most pitiless law to punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Now state lawmakers, having proved that they mean business -- even if it means killing off businesses -- are reconnecting with reality: They want to import Mexican workers….

But they kept some provisions businesses hated, including one allowing prosecutors to act on anonymous tips about undocumented workers.

The law had the desired effect. Immigrant neighborhoods in Phoenix started emptying out. Some employers called in suspect workers and fired those who admitted lacking proper documents. In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has cultivated an image as a Bull Connor for the nativist crowd, took the law as a green light to round up and harass Hispanics. … having done its utmost to have undocumented Hispanics fired and driven from the state, Arizona has now decided it badly needs low-skilled labor after all.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042001755.html

Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigration Prisons

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/index.html

System of Neglect

As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost

by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein | Washington Post Staff Writers

May 11, 2008

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.

The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died. …

The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somali without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d1p1.html

Original Government Documents, RE Medical Care

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/documents.html

DHS Will Face Questions on Care of Detained Immigrants

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Top lawmakers in Congress criticized the Department of Homeland Security yesterday for failing to provide adequate medical care to detained immigrants, and said they plan to demand explanations today from Secretary Michael Chertoff and Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) announced that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and others will question Chertoff and Myers in a meeting today about reports of medical negligence and deaths of immigrants in ICE detention, as well as improper detentions of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/21/AR2008052101962.html

Immigrants Can Linger In Detention for Months

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Foreigners detained by immigration officials spent an average of 37 days in custody during fiscal 2007, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Detainees, though, can be held for a much longer or much shorter time, depending on their circumstances. Under a practice that was expanded during the summer of 2006, undocumented immigrants caught within 100 miles of the Mexican border -- and within 14 days of their entry into the United States -- are deported swiftly under an "expedited removal" program. These immigrants usually do not have a hearing before a judge. On the other hand, some immigrants are detained for months or even years if they challenge their deportation in federal courts.

Here is a breakdown of time in custody for fiscal 2006, the most recent information ICE could provide. The figures exclude nearly 5,800 detainees who are seeking asylum.

Less than three months 206,325

Three to six months 10,828

Six to nine months 2,644

Nine months to one year 1,269

More than one year 1,809

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/13/AR2008051303112.html

In Custody, In Pain

Beset by Medical Problems as She Fights Deportation, A U.S. Resident Struggles to Get the Treatment She Needs

by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers

Page A1; May 12, 2008

FLORENCE, Ariz. -- Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.

She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back. …

Harvill is one of 33,000 immigration detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, on any given day. They are locked up in a patchwork of out-of-the-way federal detention compounds, private prisons and local jails. This unnoticed prison system was built for a quick revolving door of detainees -- into custody, out of the country. But often, people linger in detention for months or years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d2p1.html

Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation

Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason

by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers

May 14, 2008

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d4p1.html


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Deaths of Immigrants in Federal Custody Shrouded in Secrecy

A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement.

The New York Times has received a list of detainee deaths of immigrants under custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the three year period from 2004 to 2007. During that period there were 66 confirmed deaths, according to ICE’s data, which the Times notes is considerably sketchy. The title of the article, penned by Nina Bernstein, aptly describes the circumstances surrounding those deaths: “Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody.” Left unanswered is how many more detainees were harmed by inadequate or non-existent medical care, never mind those harmed by physical abuse at the hands of guards.

Let this point be absolutely crystal clear: these people are not in detention because they are criminals or because they committed a criminal offense. Many of these detainees, merely over-stayed their visas, were denied entry or are seeking political asylum. As such, this is not a “dangerous” population. Quite the contrary, many of the inmates were leading productive lives with families and communities to support them. Given the current climate, however, the government sees fit to waste taxpayer money incarcerating people who have no business behind bars. As if the insult of incarcerating low-risk people were not enough, these detainees get shoddier treatment than hardened criminals and have less legal rights. Herein are some excerpts from The Times, excellent article:

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Boubacar Bah, had overstayed a tourist visa… shackled and pinned …as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor… Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding… He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

….Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance….

Lingering Questions

The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village,

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma….

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records ... leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

He kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

With the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley,.. was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell.

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

A supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive ...a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.”

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

Had this happened to an inmate doing time for a violent crime an inquest could be called for and guards and staff could be disciplined, even charged criminally. But because these people are mere detainees they merit little attention and enjoy few rights. How many more have suffered at the hands of incompetent or sadistic guards? You can be assured that the Federal Government will not give us an answer to that question.

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