BernieHund: The Political Watchdog

While all the presidential candidates have taken a position on immigration, often jumping from one side of the fence to the other and back again depending on the audience, the best we have come up with is building the Great Tex-Mex Fence as if that provides a solution to the issue.

Several months ago one of the candidates suggested that we should send “them” all back to somewhere.  Rounding up the millions of undocumented persons who have entered the country was senseless then just as it is now.  However, over the past few months we have seen immigration officials sweep down on the wings of righteousness and round up undocumented workers, carrying them off in handcuffs.  Some are incarcerated and I suppose some are actually sent back to their native countries.

Remember the case of Agent Isaac Baichu who offered to provide a green card to an applicant in exchange for a blow job?  While most of us were stunned to learn that the practice of trading sex for a green card or agents accepting money under the table for swift delivery of a prized green card is far more prevalent than anyone would have suspected, perhaps that is far better than dying in U.S. custody should the immigrant be incarcerated.

That brings us to the story of Hiu Lui Ng who came to America in 1992 with his parents.  He was seventeen at the time.  Mr. Ng stayed in America, years beyond the expiration of his Visa.  During his years in America, Mr. Ng was educated… well educated… married and had become the father of two sons.

Last year Mr. Ng went in for his final interview for his green card.  Last week Mr. Ng, age 34, died while in U.S. custody. 

In 2001, a notice ordering him to appear in immigration court was mistakenly sent to a nonexistent address, records show. When Mr. Ng did not show up at the hearing, the judge ordered him deported. By then, however, he was getting married, and on a separate track, his wife petitioned Citizenship and Immigration Services for a green card for him — a process that took more than five years. Heeding bad legal advice, the couple showed up for his green card interview on July 19, 2007, only to find enforcement agents waiting to arrest Mr. Ng on the old deportation order.

Mr. Ng’s family began the process to get him out of jail by hiring attorneys to get his case before the courts.  During that time

Mr. Ng was held in jails under contract to the federal immigration authorities: Wyatt; the House of Correction in Greenfield, Mass.; and the Franklin County Jail in St. Albans, Vt.

But, last April Mr. Ng began to complain of severe backaches and skin itching so badly that he was unable to sleep. 

He was then in the Vermont jail, a 20-bed detention center with no medical staff run by the county sheriff’s office. Seeking care, he asked to be transferred back to Wyatt, a 700-bed center with its own medical staff, owned and operated by a municipal corporation.

On July 3, 2008 Mr. Ng arrived back at the Wyatt center

spending the first three days in pain in a dark isolation cell. Later he was assigned an upper bunk and required to climb up and down at least three times a day for head counts, causing terrible pain. His brother-in-law B. Zhao appealed for help in e-mail messages to the warden, Wayne Salisbury, on July 11 and 16.

In those correspondences, Mr. Zhao complained that Mr. Ng looked terrible and was in pain.

The nursing director replied that Mr. Ng had been granted a bottom bunk and was receiving painkillers and muscle relaxants prescribed by a detention center doctor.

Mr. Ng’s condition deteriorated from that of a man “who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds.”

“He said, ‘I told the nursing department, I’m in pain, but they don’t believe me,’ ” his sister recalled. “ ‘They tell me, stop faking.’ ”

Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied.

Mr. Ng told his lawyer he was ready to give up, the affidavit said, “because he could no longer withstand the suffering inside the facility,” but Officer Smith insisted that Mr. Ng would first have to withdraw all his appeals.

The account of his treatment clearly disturbed the federal judge, William E. Smith of United States District Court in Providence, who instructed the government’s lawyer the next day to have the warden get Mr. Ng to the hospital for an M.R.I.

The results were grim: cancer in his liver, lungs and bones, and a fractured spine. “ ‘I don’t have much time to live,’ ” his sister said he told her in a call from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

She said the doctor warned that if the family came to visit, immigration authorities might transfer her brother. Three days passed before the warden approved a family visit, she said, after demanding their Social Security numbers. Late in the afternoon of Aug. 5, as Mr. Ng lay on a gurney, hours away from death and still under guard, she and his wife held up his sons, 3 and 1.

Mr. Ng died.  On Tuesday his attorneys demanded a criminal investigation into the matter

in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

Affidavits filed state

guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

Of course, the immigration officials are mum on the case.  However,

in response to a relative of Mr. Ng’s who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center’s director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for “chronic back pain.” He added, “We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible.”

Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.

On July 31, the federal judge who heard the case insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed.  Finally, on August 1, 2008 Mr. Ng

was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.

This is not an isolated case, as horrendous as it may be.  Francisco Castanada, 36, died in a California detention center where his cancer went undiagnosed.  The federal government admitted medical negligence in the case. 

In May, The New York Times chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, 52, a Guinean tailor who suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey; records show he was left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours.

Those are the cases that have met with media coverage.  We have no idea of the total number of undocumented immigrants who have died in detention through negligence.  Some have no family ties, no one to check on their conditions or report their deaths or pursue an investigation.

I am reminded of the U.S. government, over a century ago rounding up the Native Americans, forcing them to walk for days without food or water along the Trail of Tears to the Oklahoma confines.  Or, perhaps, the roundup of Japanese-Americans during World War II and their placement in interment camps for the duration of the war.  Or, most recently those detainees and enemy combatants who are being held in Guantanamo without access to legal representation.

As Amnesty International, the Red Cross and other outspoken well meaning groups seek to bring the world consciousness to conditions in China, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or wherever injustices continue, I suggest once again that while we in America are blessed with freedoms unknown in many countries we must look within our own borders, within our own detention centers and jails before with clear conscience and true meaning can we condemn those beyond our borders who have no respect for human life.