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Better Health Care Sought for Detained Immigrants
By Nina Bernstein and Julia Preston
The New York Times
Wednesday 07 May 2008
The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate
medical care in immigration detention announced on Tuesday that she had introduced
legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths
be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.
"This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,"
the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill,
which she introduced late last week. "This is about whether the government
is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization."
The need for the bill, she said, was underscored by an article in The New York
Times on Monday about the 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from
Guinea. His name was one of 66 on a government list of detention deaths obtained
from Immigration and Customs Enforcement by The Times under the Freedom of Information
Act.
Records show that Mr. Bah, who suffered a skull fracture and multiple brain
hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, was left in an
isolation cell there without treatment for more than 14 hours.
Ms. Lofgren's legislation would require the federal government to establish
mandatory standards for medical and mental health care, replacing the voluntary
standards that apply now in the network of more than 300 publicly and privately
run jails where the government holds people while it decides whether to deport
them.
The bill would also require the secretary of the Homeland Security Department
to report all deaths in immigration detention within 48 hours to the Justice
Department's inspector general as well as its own. Immigration officials
would be required to submit a detailed report on such deaths to Congress every
year.
"We are not talking about Cadillac health care here," Ms. Lofgren
said, "but the government is obligated to provide basic care. Many of
those in immigration custody are there for minor violations, many for administrative
and paperwork-related mistakes. Their detention should not be a death sentence."
Officials of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said they would not comment
on Ms. Lofgren's proposal because they did not discuss pending legislation.
But officials said that while the number of immigrants detained had increased
by 34 percent from 2004 through last year, the numbers of deaths in its detention
centers had declined each year.
"While a single death of an ICE detainee is a serious matter, we strive
to maintain safe, secure and human detention conditions and to ensure that all
detainees receive quality health care," said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman
for the agency.
According to figures the agency provided on Tuesday, from January 2004 until
last Friday it recorded 71 deaths of immigrants in its custody, including 5
since the list was released to The Times, 4 of them this year. Ms. Nantel did
not provide details of those cases.
In the 2004 fiscal year, according to the figures, the agency detained 231,804
immigrants, and about one out of every 9,200 died. In fiscal 2007, when the
agency detained a total of 311,213 immigrants, roughly one out of every 28,000
died. Immigration officials said the agency spent $91.6 million last year on
health care for its detention centers, an 82 percent increase since 2004.
Ms. Lofgren said the agency's count of deaths could understate the problem,
because detainees who were denied critical treatment could die after they were
released or deported.
She cited the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the
hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis
for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant, despite his
pleas and doctors' recommendations. By the time he received the treatment
he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have metastasized penile
cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.
He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and died
on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.
In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in
a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical negligence
in the case last month.
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