US immigration detention centres under spotlight.
January 11 2010 by Liam Clifford
Officials at US immigration detention facilities exposed as 'corrupted' and 'incapable.'
US immigration officials have been exposed as using their positions in the country's immigration detention centres to hide evidence of immigrant mis-treatment, it has been reported today.
Referring to documents unseen by the public, the New York Times newspaper claims that investigators into the detention centres concluded that intolerable, ignored pain had been a major contributing factor in the suicide of 22-year old immigrant detainee, Nery Romero, at the US immigration detention facility at Bergen County Jail in New Jersey.
Further investigation found that medical staff at the facility had doctored a medication record to show that the Salvadoran detainee had been given Motrin.
However the lie was easy to spot, as when the drug was supposedly given to Romero he was already dead.
Another case that has been highlighted in this US immigration scandal is that of Boubacar Bah, a Guinean immigrant who suffered a fractured skull, subsequently a flurry of activity pursued between immigration officials at the privately run prison he had been detained at.
The paper pointed out that Bah, 52, had been put in an isolation cell and left without treatment for more than thirteen hours, before an ambulance was sent for.
However the subject of the emails and phone calls between 10 immigration officials was not the welfare of the man, but how they would defer the expected $10,000 a month care costs. The main option explored was returning the dying man, who was in a coma, to Guinea the paper noted.
It was eventually agreed upon he would be released into the care of his cousins in New York, however days before the release, Boubacar Bah died.
So far there has been no comment from any institution implicated in the report or US immigration.
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