Vol. 72/No. 24      June 16, 2008

A federal judge in March allowed the Castaneda family to move forward with a lawsuit, ruling the denial of care was “beyond cruel and unusual punishment.”

Castaneda’s case is not an exception. “Dogs get better care in the dog pound,” Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center told the Washington Post. She quit after two months of work in 2007. “You don’t treat people like that,” Rouse said. “There has to be some kind of moral fiber.”

The May 5 New York Times detailed the death in custody of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea, accused of overstaying a tourist visa. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records show Bah was shackled and pinned to the floor of a medical unit, then left in a cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was “unresponsive” and foaming at the mouth. His family only learned he was ill four days later when another prisoner managed to call and even then the private company that runs the jail wouldn’t give them any information. Finally, on the fifth day, a prison official called and gave them the name of a hospital. Bah never regained consciousness and died on May 30, 2007.

The Post noted that 83 immigrants have died in, or soon after leaving, custody during the past five years. Among those who died are workers from Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Ghana, Korea, and Haiti.

The number of immigrants jailed has skyrocketed since the administration of President George Bush transferred deportation authority in 2003 to ICE.

Seven of the 23 immigration jails are run by private for-profit companies. Many are held at 279 local and county jails.

“These way stations between life in and outside the United States are mostly out of sight,” the Post reports. “In deserts and industrial warehouse districts, in sequestered valleys next to other prisons, or near noisy airports. Some compounds never allow detainees outdoor recreation; others let them out onto tiny dirt patches once or twice a week.”

Only one in 10 detainees has an attorney and even their lawyers have difficulty obtaining medical information or even finding clients, who are routinely moved without notice.

Making a phone call is often impossible. Phones frequently don’t work, and requirements for using them—punching in an Alien Registration Number as opposed to an unrelated number printed on the prisoner’s wristband—are baffling, the Government Accountability Office admitted last year. At the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, where Bah was held, 9 of 30 posted numbers for foreign consulates were wrong.
 
 
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Union holds hearing on ICE deportations  
 
 
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