The Obama Administration has promised to overhaul and better oversee the sprawling warrens of immigration jails and prisons that are scattered in small and large facilities across the country. Indeed, in the past year they have dispatched teams of inspectors tasked with analyzing conditions in each one of those facilities. Presumably as a consequence of that scrutiny, many of those facilities no longer house immigration detainees.
But since 2003, after ICE was created, and many more people were subject to detention—either because they were awaiting deportation, or they were fighting deportation orders—there have been a string of deaths, 107 counted officially, that have been it appears deliberately shrouded in mystery, kept from public view, reported the New York Times on Sunday.
In 2008, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein wrote about a “system of neglect” that often resulted in unneeded death, including the harrowing death of the uncle and surrogate father of award-winning novelist/memoirist Edwidge Danticat.
In order to do the report the WaPo obtained thousands of medical records, which they spent months in analyzing until they could sort out a pattern.
Now, the NY Times and the ACLU have obtained more reams of records about those deaths through the Freedom of Information Act, including “scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.”
The Times and WaPo’s accounts of the deaths are deeply troubling. It seems that getting sick inside this system is a dangerous business. But what is also troubling is that many of the officials who seemed the most active in obfuscating and obscuring the facts and causes of these deaths, are still prominently in place.
(THE PHOTO is by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times and shows the family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell.)
[…] Shared Covering Up Deaths in Immigration Lock-Ups. […]