Medical Neglect in Immigrant Prisons Reveals Dark Side of America

What Have We Become?

Medical Neglect in Immigrant Prisons Reveals America at Its Worst

New America Media posted the following excerpted commentary on Aug. 17, 2008.  

Read the New York Times news coverage about the late Hiu Lui Ng -- as well as lawyers' request for an investigation into his death -- to learn more about his alleged medical care.

BOSTON -- On the eve of the Beijing Olympics, while Bush was preparing to express his "deep concerns" over China's human rights record, Chinese immigrant Hiu Lui Ng was dying in the custody of our great nation's own U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

For months, according to the New York Times, 33-year-old Mr. Ng had complained of excruciating back pain. Officials accused him of faking it.

When a judge finally ordered that Mr. Ng be brought to a hospital, it was discovered that he had a fractured spine, cancer all over his body, and very little time to live. He died five days later, leaving behind a wife and two young sons.

Even as President Bush scolds the Chinese government for its human rights abuses, he is presiding over a humanitarian disaster in his own country.

The death of Mr. Ng is just business as usual for the Bush administration. Mr. Ng is just one of dozens of migrants in the past few years who have died from apparent medical neglect in ICE's sprawling detention system.

In a case very similar to Mr. Ng's, Salvadoran migrant Francisco Castaneda went for almost a year in detention without treatment for a very painful penile lesion. He eventually died from cancer that had spread all over his body. A federal judge described the treatment of Castaneda as "beyond cruel and unusual."

While Bush was expressing his "firm opposition" [to] the detention of dissidents in China, his administration was imprisoning migrant children in family detention centers like the Don Hutto Residential Facility.

In 2007, Kevin Yourdkhani wrote this in crayon from Don Hutto: "I don't like to stay in this jail. I'm only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I'm sleeping beside the wall...his place is not good for me. I want to get out of the cell. Just pleace give visa for my family [sic]."

Cases like these have led many U.S. citizens like myself to ask, "What have we become?".

We are now at a point where authorized migrants can be deported for insignificant crimes like the jumping of a subway turnstile, and unauthorized migrants are subject to fear and exploitation that would make even some of the worst governments on the planet ashamed.

Migrants like Mr. Ng are confronting the harsh reality of a broken system with blurry lines, and dying because of it.

Mr. Ng was 17 when he entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa from Hong Kong. He fell out of legal status after he overstayed his visa but was in the process of getting a green card when ICE picked him up.

Mr. Ng worked hard, trained himself in computer services, and had recently secured a contract for a company with offices in the Empire State Bulding.

Mr. Ng should be living the American Dream but instead he has become a victim of the American nightmare. His wife and children, all U.S. citizens, no longer have a husband and father to take care of them.

I am not an "open borders" advocate. I am just appalled that people are being treated like this in the United States of America. Migrant advocates will argue that racism is to blame for all of these abuses.

Racism certainly plays a part in all of this, but the truth is migrants are suffering mostly because they had the misfortune of being born on a different piece of the earth than U.S. citizens did.

The only real solution to this crisis is to provide opportunities in the countries migrants are fleeing from.

Until we live in a world where people migrate out of want, instead of need, we have to treat migrants as humanely as possible. The world we live in is interconnected.  We ignore these fundamental truths at our own peril.

If President Bush really wants to be in a position to denounce China's government, he should consider a moratorium on raids, detentions, and deportations, until the U.S. enacts comprehensive, practical, and humane migration reform.

Perhaps then he won't have to tell the world about the benefits of freedom and democracy. Migrants will tell the world for him.

The author, Kyle de Beausset, is Boston-based Guatemalan-American immigrant rights advocate and journalist with the Knight Foundation/MTV Choose Or Lose Street Team '08. He runs a popular blog, Citizen Orange, and helped found another one, The Sanctuary.  His writing has appeared in publications like the Harvard Crimson and the Bay State Banner.

source:  NewAmericaMedia.org

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