Thread: Cellmate Describes Pain of Detainee Who Died

Cellmate Describes Pain of Detainee Who Died



By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 19, 2008
A lawsuit filed in federal court a year ago by a Dominican detainee makes complaints about health care at a detention center in Rhode Island that are similar to accounts of how the center treated a Chinese New Yorker who died Aug. 6 in immigration custody. That inmate was suffering from a fractured spine and extensive cancer that had gone undiagnosed until five days before his death.


Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Marino De Los Santos, with his wife, Valerie. He contends that he received little treatment for injuries at a detention center.


Cornell Corrections of Rhode Island, one of the defendants, which ran the center at the time covered by the suit, denied any wrongdoing in its answer.

In the case of Hiu Lui Ng, who was the subject of an article last week in The New York Times, lawyers and relatives said that when he was racked with pain and too weak to walk, detention officials refused him a wheelchair, failed to take him to scheduled appointments for an M.R.I. exam or a CT scan, and instead took him in shackles to Hartford — where he was pressured to withdraw his appeals and accept deportation.

The lawsuit by Mr. De Los Santos and details of earlier medical evaluations that fell short of diagnosing Mr. Ng’s terminal illness and debilitating injury, emerged this week as members of Congress demanded a full accounting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. De Los Santos, 37, said that Mr. Ng was briefly his cellmate early last month and that his extreme back pain and weakness were apparent.

“He was crying all night,â€

Well, this information is unlikely to be true. After all, we are reading it in the New York Times which means at least half of it has to be bullshit.

But, I would say that if a more credible news agency were to verify this and it was true that some people at that detention center need to be fired and their policies need to be reviewed.

Are these even ICE officers or are these more "contractors" for private prisons like in Iraq? I mean, we all know Bush and Chertoff are trying to screw up enforcement as much as they can so the public will cry uncle and say OK we accept your amnesty that is not called an amnesty because we can't stomach your kind of botched enforcement.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME FIND THAT ARTICLE WHERE CHERTOFF SAID HE WOULD GIVE US ENFORCEMENT BUT WE WOULD NOT LIKE IT?

W