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  1. #1
    Senior Member zeezil's Avatar
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    Are Detention Health Hearings Based On Smear & Intended

    Are Detention Health Hearings Based On Smear & Intended To Protect Illegal Aliens From Deportation?
    By Roy Beck, Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 9:26 PM

    ICE Chief Julie Myers goes before a congressional panel Wednesday to answer charges such as that she is allowing "immigrants in detention (to) languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill," as the New York Times stated in an editorial today (June 3).

    When I talked with her in the afternoon, she was still fuming in consternation at what looks to be a coordinated onslaught by the nation's most prestigious media and the nation's immigration lawyers to shut down much of the system of detaining illegal aliens after they are arrested to ensure that they show up for deportation hearings.

    ILLEGAL ALIENS DESERVE HUMANE TREATMENT

    I will admit to you that when the Big Media unveiled their investigative series on health care in detention centers last months, I asked my NumbersUSA staff to look into our taking a public stand to decry the abuse that was described.

    NumbersUSA's position has always been that illegal aliens should be treated humanely as they are detected, detained and deported. I believe strongly that an advanced civilization goes to great lengths to ensure the physical safety of those it incarcerates. When individuals' freedoms are taken away through jailing, the state must take on every responsibility to ensure that they are not harmed due to their own lack of individual freedom to defend themselves.

    My position has been that if there is a problem with detention health care, it should be fixed. But any such problem should not be used in any way to hamper efforts to remove and drive illegal aliens from this country.

    I will be interested to see if any of the Congress Members trip up Chief Myers. Under my stream of questions today, she certainly made a strong case that most of the charges of bad health treatment are false or misleading, and that the legitimate cases that have been raised were in the past before ICE instituted new procedures last year and early this year. (I'll give you examples below.)

    OPEN-BORDERS FOLKS TRYING TO SLOW DEPORTATIONS

    But first, I need to note that Chief Myers is too polite -- and too politically astute -- to say what is really going on with this hearing and all these news stories.

    That is, the sudden spotlight on health care for detained illegal aliens has almost nothing to do with health and almost everything to do with the open-borders crowd desperately attempting to slow down the accelerating enforcement across the nation as unleashed by Myers and her enthusiastic ICE team.

    The last thing the open-borders crowd wants is for the public to see that real enforcement is possible. That it causes a lot of other illegal aliens to decide to pack up. That American workers are available to fill the jobs vacated by the arrested and fleeing illegal workers.

    Myers and her ICE team in the past year are proving that illegal immigration is not inevitable and can be controlled.

    NO SUICIDE IN 15 MONTHS

    The Washington Post did a huge multi-day investigative series last month detailing what it said were examples of incredibly bad health care for illegal aliens who are put into federal detention centers. The New York Times and CBS's 60 Minutes quickly followed suit, followed by a number of other media across the country.

    One of the themes was that the trauma of being arrested and detained for breaking immigration laws is so great that many commit suicides and that ICE has been negligent in stopping them.

    I was a little surprised today when Myers told me that despite having tens of thousands of detainees, ICE has had NO suicide in 15 months!

    This variation with the news reporting apparently can be found up and down the list of grievances. In most cases, the anecdotal evidence of problems reported by the media were representative of situations that in aggregate have been at much lower rates than found in jails nationwide. And the health care of illegal aliens in most cases appears to be far superior to what American citizens get when they are in jail.
    http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusab ... smear.html
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  2. #2
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
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    Heard Lou talk about this on his show today. Wish I could remember more of what he said but got the impression he thought the Post and I believe NY Times had been making this an issue mainly with an agenda to push. Not surprising.

    ~~

    Immigration Agency to Reveal Some Death Data
    DHS Bureau Will Report the Number of People Who Die Awaiting Deportation

    By Amy Goldstein
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Thursday, June 5, 2008; A02



    The top U.S. immigration enforcement official told a congressional subcommittee yesterday that the Bush administration will disclose more information about foreigners who die in the sprawling network of federal detention centers around the country.

    Julie Myers, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, said her agency will report such deaths to a branch of the Justice Department that collects similar information about inmates in state prisons and local jails.

    The Justice Department publishes statistics on the fatalities, not the identities of the victims, but Myers said the change represents "more transparency" about detainee deaths. Since last year, congressional Democrats have pleaded with ICE to reveal the names and circumstances of foreigners who have died in U.S. custody.

    Myers announced the new reporting requirement during a congressional hearing on medical care for immigration detainees, the first since The Washington Post published a series of articles last month that documented a broken system of care for the growing number of foreigners who are imprisoned while the government tries to deport them.

    The articles, based on thousands of pages of internal documents, found that 83 detainees had died since ICE was created five years ago and that many more sick and mentally ill people have been denied the treatment to which they are entitled. The Post found medical staff shortages, treatment delays, sloppy record-keeping, poor administrative practices and cover-ups by employees aware of the poor care.

    Yesterday's hearing was partisan and testy. Myers said ICE has been working to improve the health-care system. But detainees, their lawyers and relatives, and advocates for immigrants offered graphic testimony about misdiagnoses, medical neglect and secrecy.

    ICE officials "are defending the indefensible," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee. "Whatever you think about the overall debate on immigration," Lofgren said in an interview, "you are not supposed to kill people who are in custody."

    Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) countered, "Why should the American people be responsible for paying for Rolls-Royce medical care for illegal aliens?"

    Myers and committee Republicans said that ICE figures show that the rate of deaths among detainees has fallen in recent years, and that fewer people die in immigration detention than in prison.

    But one witness, who works in detention centers with foreigners seeking asylum in the United States, disputed ICE's claims, saying that health care in detention centers "is getting worse, not better." Homer Venters, a physician at the Bellevue-New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, said ICE's assertion that deaths among detainees fell by 49 percent between 2006 and 2007 is misleading.

    Venters said those figures ignore the fact that detainees are, on average, spending less time in custody. Taking the length of stay into account, he testified, the mortality rate during that period increased by 20 percent.

    Venters said ICE's assertion that fewer people die in immigration detention than in prison also is misleading because detainees tend to be younger and in custody for less time than prisoners.

    Democrats grilled Myers about The Post's findings that more than 250 detainees had been sedated with powerful psychotropic drugs for their deportation over the past five years, even though they were not mentally ill. ICE has recently changed its rules to require permission from a federal judge before detainees are drugged for behavioral reasons. Myers said yesterday that the agency has sought four such court orders, all of which are pending.

    www.washingtonpost.com
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