Thread: TX: Mentally ill detainees' care criticized

Mentally ill detainees' care criticized
By RENÉE C. LEE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
March 30, 2010, 9:16AM

A growing number of immigrants with mental health issues are being held in federal detention centers that are ill-equipped to care for them, and their cases are being handled in courts that lack consistent procedures to ensure they receive fair hearings, according to a report released today by a Texas advocacy group.

The report, the culmination of a yearlong research project, details what the authors say is a systematic problem in the nation's immigration courts and detention centers. Immigrants with mental disabilities are routinely treated in an unjust and inhumane manner by the system, they said. Texas houses at least one quarter of all immigration detainees in the United States.

Detainees, for example, are often placed in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks or months, when they display symptoms of mental disability, because untrained detention staff see them as a behavior problem.

In court, detainees usually are not competent enough to defend themselves, yet they are forced to do so because they have no rights to a court-appointed attorney.

“The report highlights a population that's been largely forgotten,â€

Hmmm........all I see addressed in this complaint is exactly the same kind of treatment that advocates for mentaly ill American citizens have been fighting to correct for decades.

Now, why is it that we have not been able to do something about this for our own population but are expected to just hop-to because it's "inhumane treatment" of ilegal aliens?

Those detainees with mental disorders should be stabilized, delivered safely to the hands of their own governments and let them take it from there.