34 illegal immigrants transferred to Franklin County House of Correction
by The Republican Newsroom
Friday December 12, 2008, 7:05 PM

By FRED CONTRADA
fcontrada@repub.com

GREENFIELD - The Franklin County House of Correction has received 34 immigrant detainees from among a larger group that was transferred from a Rhode Island facility after a 34-year-old Chinese national died there.

U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement removed a total of 153 detainees from the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., on Monday, according to Paula M. Grenier, a spokeswoman for the federal agency. Grenier said that Immigration and Custom Enforcement plans to conduct a full review of the facility now that the detainees have been transferred. Investigators are expected to look into the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a detainee who died in August while in custody at Wyatt.

According to Grenier, most of the detainees were relocated to other facilities in New England. Some of them arrived at the Franklin County House of Correction on Monday.


"We received 34 in one shot," said Assistant Superintendent Kevin E. Brown.

Brown said the jail has been housing immigration detainees for several years through a contract with the federal agency which monitors and investigates matters of national security. It was formed under the Department of Homeland Security after the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service was disbanded in 2002.

According to Brown, one of the jail's four pods is dedicated to immigration detainees and can hold a maximum of 71 people. In order to accept the detainees from Wyatt, the jail had to transfer out 26 of its own detainees, Brown said. Most of them went to correctional facilities in Rhode Island, though not to Wyatt, according to Brown.

As Brown explained it, immigration detainees are classified as either level one, two or three. Level three detainees are usually facing criminal charges. All the detainees that transferred into and out of the Greenfield jail were classified level one or two, Brown said.

The Franklin County House of Correction has a $2.1 million contract with Immigration and Custom Enforcement to house immigration detainees, according to Brown. The detainees are not kept with inmates who are in jail for criminal activities.

"They're well behaved and decent people," Brown said. "They really don't give us a problem."

Laura Rotolo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Boston, has been compiling a report on the treatment of immigration detainees and faults the federal agency for lack of oversight.

"If the media hadn't reported what happened at Wyatt, (the agency) would never know what was going on there," she said. "I don't think the facilities in our state are any better. Will it take another death in Franklin County to have them investigate there?"

Grenier said her agency is in the process of responding to the Rotolo's concerns, but stressed that the federal government takes allegations of detainee abuse very seriously.

"We make every effort to ensure that detainee facilities are safe and secure and that we provide appropriate conditions of confinement," she said.

Brown said that a federal agent comes to the Franklin County House of Correction every week to work with detainees. The jail also has its own caseworker dedicated to that population, he said.

However, Rotolo said that transfers such as the one that took place this week can be extremely disruptive for detainees. Often, she said, medical records lag behind so that they don't receive prescribed medications. She questioned why Franklin County had to transfer out its own detainees to accept the ones from Wyatt.

"They're like little pawns in a chess game," she said.

Rotolo said that the federal government compensates Massachusetts facilities $80 to $90 per day per immigration detainee. A story in The Providence Journal estimates that Wyatt stands to lose about $100,000 a week with the loss of the detainees.

Ng, a computer engineer from New York, had a fractured spine and died of complications from cancer on Aug. 6, according to The Providence Journal. Ng's lawyers maintain that he was denied medical care at Wyatt and another jail in Vermont that had a contract with the immigration agency, the Journal reported. He was married with two children and had no criminal record.
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