Hong Kong emigrant's death attracts scrutiny of U.S. detention system

[DogPoundPup]

Source: International Herald Tribune

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer.

Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a U.S. citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to U.S. and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

Ng's death follows a succession of cases that have drawn congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

In U.S. court affidavits, Ng's lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, 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 U.S. government lockup in Hartford, Connecticut, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/13/america/immig.php

[PDJane]

1. The thugs have taken over...........

with the blessing of the administration.

[PDJane]

2. One comment,

and one vote? Where's the outrage???

[barbtries]

4. there's an earlier thread

maybe more than one.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x376516

[gaspee]

5. In the other thread about this (n/T)

[Caria]

3. Torture and murder of a dying man

in our name... I am so sickened by this. What has this country come to? Everyone who abused this man - and the list is apparently quite long - should be imprisoned themselves.

[malaise]

6. One of the saddest stories I have read in ages

This was torture and murder.

[McCamy Taylor]

7. Unfortunately, some nurse will lose a license and that is all that will happen.

No one else in the system will be punished or sanctioned and they will hire a replacement nurse to practice the same kind of bad medicine that the first bad nurse was paid to dispense. The government will decline to let itself be sued, and the whole thing will be swept under the rug.

[treestar]

8. If his wife is an American citizen, why they did not give him his green

card is the question. Many people never see the citizens in all this. The wife had a right to have him legal.

[blackspade]

9. WTF.

These ICE folks are scum.
Obviously common sense has no meaning to these idiots.
They should deport everyone of these fools who had anything to do with this case from the prosecutor to the guards.
Despicable.