"Keep, mongrel lands, your filthy bums!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your white, your brainy,
Your middle classes yearning to breathe free,
The stranded preys of your teeming hordes.
Send these, the hopeless, tax-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the iron door!"
Adapted from:
potw.org
Deaths of immigrants in U.S. held for deportation spark scrutiny
By Nina Bernstein
Published: June 26, 2007
Sandra Kenley was returning home from her native Barbados in 2005 when she was swept into the fastest-growing U.S. form of incarceration: immigration detention.
Seven weeks later, Kenley died in a rural Virginia jail, where she had complained of not receiving medicine for high blood pressure. She was one of 62 immigrants to die in administrative custody since 2004, according to a new tally by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that counted many more deaths than the 20 previously known.
No government body is charged with accounting for deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and U.S. government facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not U.S. citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them.
Getting details about those who die in custody is a difficult undertaking left to family members, advocacy groups and lawyers. But as the immigration detention system balloons to meet demands for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, deaths in custody, and the secrecy and confusion around them, are drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and government investigators.
Spurred by bipartisan reports of abuses in detention, the Senate unanimously passed an amendment to a proposed immigration bill that would establish an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security. Detention capacity would grow by 20,000 beds, or 73 percent, under the bill, which was expected to be debated again Tuesday in the Senate.
Complaints focus on a lack of independent oversight and failures to enforce standards for medical care, suicide prevention and access to legal help.
The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a "special review" of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating. Kim died of pancreatic cancer while in U.S. custody on Sept. 11, 2005, the day after she was taken to a hospital.
Some of the sharpest criticism of the troubled system has come from officials at one of the largest detention centers in the country, the York County Prison in Pennsylvania.
"The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care," the York County Prison's warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year.
Officials with the immigration agency say that some deaths are inevitable and that sufficient outside scrutiny comes from local medical examiners. Detention expanded by more than 32 percent last year, and the average length of stay was cut to 35 days from 89, said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
"We spend $98 million annually to provide medical care for people in our custody," Zuieback said. "Anybody who violates our national immigration law is going to get the same treatment by ICE regardless of their medical condition."
She declined to release information about the 62 detention deaths since 2004, including names, locations or causes.
Detention standards were adopted by the immigration agency in 2000, but are not legally enforceable, unlike rules for the treatment of criminal inmates. The Department of Homeland Security has resisted American Bar Association efforts to turn the standards into regulations, saying that that would reduce the agency's flexibility.
Some advocates of limits on immigration say the solution is quicker deportations. "The taxpayer cannot be expected to underwrite the elaborate detention facilities that some of these organizations want," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In the case of Kenley, a legal permanent resident of the United States for more than 30 years, detention interrupted her medical care for high blood pressure, a fibroid tumor and uterine bleeding. An autopsy attributed her death to an enlarged heart from chronic hypertensive disease. But a report by emergency medical services said that she had fallen from a top bunk, and that a cellmate had pounded on the door for 20 minutes before guards responded.
Kenley's sister, June Everett, said her questions had gone unanswered.
"How did my sister die?" she asked, as Kenley's daughter, Nicole, wept. "It's a whole set of confusion, so who knows, really? And I would like to know."
Kenley was traveling with her 1-year-old granddaughter when she arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, records show, and she was ordered to return without the baby to discuss two misdemeanor drug convictions that had surfaced in an airport database.
She obeyed. A transcript shows she acknowledged that she was convicted for drug possession in 1984 and in 2002 for trying to buy a small amount of cocaine.
She described a life derailed by drug addiction after 11 years of working in a newspaper mailroom. But she was arrested because the drug convictions made her subject to exclusion from the United States.
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