US SECRET POLICE – RUN AMOK – NY TIMES 7

NY TIMES: July 26, 2009
Federal immigration squads with shotguns and automatic weapons forcing their way into citizens’ homes without warrants or lawful consent, shoving open doors and climbing through windows in predawn darkness, pulling innocent people from their beds, holding groggy occupants at gunpoint, taking people away without explanation — after invading the wrong house.

This is a true account of the depths to which the Bush administration sank in its twilight, when immigration enforcement was ramped up to a feverish extreme.

The details are in a report released Wednesday by the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. It describes a campaign of illegal home invasions waged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from 2006 to 2008 on Long Island and in New Jersey. The report, written by a panel led by Lawrence Mulvey, the police commissioner of Nassau County on Long Island, examined 700 arrest records obtained through Freedom of Information lawsuits, and found a shameful pattern of abuses.

The raids were supposed to be a hunt for gang members and other dangerous criminal fugitives, but two-thirds of those arrested were happenstance targets — Latinos with civil immigration violations. Although agents lacked judicial warrants, and thus could not legally enter private homes without a resident’s informed consent, they routinely did so anyway — in 86 percent of the Long Island cases studied and 24 percent of those in New Jersey. And while ICE was legally required to have reasonable suspicion before detaining and questioning anybody, in two-thirds of arrest reports studied, no explanation for the initial arrest was given.

It hardly needs saying that the raids were tactical failures as well as moral outrages. Three days of raids in Nassau County, for example, netted only 6 of 96 targets. Commissioner Mulvey and the Nassau county executive, Tom Suozzi, fiercely denounced the raids at the time as reckless, lawless and dangerous — ICE agents, they said, were flagrantly undisciplined, to the point of mistakenly drawing weapons on county police officers. The Cardozo report powerfully confirms their judgment.

The Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Janet Napolitano, says it has been trying to undo the worst excesses of Bush-era immigration enforcement. It should hasten to adopt the Cardozo report’s recommendations, including no home raids except as a last resort to catch dangerous fugitives; no raids without judicial warrants; videotaping of agents in action, and retraining them on procedures; beginning an inspector general’s investigation to see how far the abuses spread.

Immigration Agency’s List of Deaths in Custody – 5/5/08

Immigration Agency’s List of Deaths in Custody

May 5, 2008 – NYTIMES, NINA BERNSTEIN AND MARGOT WILLIAMS
The document that follows, “Detainee Deaths 2004-November 2007,” is the government’s fullest account to date of deaths in immigration detention. Compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, it lists the names of 66 people who died, their dates of birth and death, where they were last held, where they died and the cause of death.

Times Topics: In-Custody DeathsBut errors and omissions on the list made it difficult for The Times to confirm the identities of many whose deaths had not previously come to public attention, to find out why they died, or to locate relatives.

Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides, 14 as the result of various cardiac ailments and 9 related to H.I.V. and AIDS, the list includes cryptic causes of death like “unresponsive” and “undetermined.” The list does not mention the immigrants’ nationalities or where they lived in the United States. Some names and birth dates appear garbled.

For example, No. 39 on the list is Reinaldo Prado-Arencilia, who died in a Houston hospital after an “unwitnessed arrest” in a privately run detention center. A nationwide database search turned up no one with that name, but found a person named Reinaldo Prado-Arencibia who had lived in Florida. No. 18, N. Enriquez-Betancourt, is missing a first name. The birth date provided for No. 27, Yvel Fils-Aime, would have made him 48 when he died, but a newspaper obituary reported that a 29-year-old named Yvel Filsaime died on the same day in 2004, in the same place in Virginia. On Friday, immigration authorities confirmed that the birth date on the list was incorrect. Mr. Filsaime was born Nov. 2, 1975, they said, not Oct. 3, 1956.

The list does not say where two of the detainees were being held, but it does provide locations for the others. It shows that 38 percent of the detainees were held in centers operated by county or local governments, and 27 percent in those run by the federal government. Privately run centers had 32 percent of the deaths, even though they housed only 19 percent of detainees over all, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

There are more than 300 detention centers around the country, but one private operator, the Corrections Corporation of America, had 13 deaths in its centers, including 5 at one in Eloy, Ariz. One locally run detention center, Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va., had 4 deaths, and another, Kern County’s Lerdo Detention Complex in Bakersfield, Calif., had 3.

The government produced the list after a Congressional hearing last fall into medical care and deaths in immigration custody. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the chairwoman of the House subcommittee that held the hearing, pressed for information on detainee deaths.

Some deaths on the list had already been reported by The Times or other news outlets, or identified by advocacy groups or lawyers. Two more deaths in immigration custody have come to light since the list was issued:

Cesar Gonzales-Baeza, 35, a Mexican, died of accidental electrocution on Dec. 7, 2007, two days after the jackhammer he was using on a detainee work crew hit a power line at the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, Calif., according to The Associated Press.

Arturo Suarez-Almenares, 72, a Cuban, died on March 2, after a heart attack at the Middlesex County Jail in New Jersey, according to The Home News Tribune.

Readers with information about the men and women listed on the document, or with knowledge of other deaths in immigration detention, can contact The Times by using this link.

How to Kill a Greencard applicant – Jail Diet as served at McHenry County Jail Illinois.

My thanks to Www.condron.us for this outlet for true information. Excerpts below supplemented with what I witnessed in this jail, where I was incarcerated from May 15, 09 – July 7, then moved to a ‘Better’ jail’ when I shouldnt have been in jail at all….

‘He was taken from his home in Des Plaines, Ill., where he lived with his wife and 7-year-old daughter, and languished in detention facilities for close to four years, according to Heeren’. Hussain’s extended detention represents a recent trend, Heeren said, in which detainees are being kept longer and longer in the jails. They have to worry about the possibility of years of incarceration on top of the fear of deportation.

Immigrants who are detained for years are the exception rather than the rule, according to ICE statistics. In 2007, the average time ICE detainees spent in prison was 37.5 days. In a phone interview in May while still detained, Hussain described McHenry as the least effective facility in meeting his religious needs. He repeatedly requested the Kosher diet, he said, because it was the closest option to the Halal diet of the Muslim faith. He was repeatedly denied, he said, despite filing more than 50 complaints.

SO THE FOOD SERVED TO IMMIGRATION ‘ADMINISTRATIVE DETAINEES’ (non criminal, ordinary ‘just not born in USA’ and in fact, some who were born in USA but have been put in Immigration jail anyway, destroying their lives, careers and mental and physical health.)

THERE WERE NO FAT PEOPLE IN IMMIGRATION JAIL – IMMIGRANTS TEND NOT TO DO THAT TO THEMSELVES, THEY WERE MOSTLY CIVILISED EDUCATED SKINNY CITIZENS…..

YET TO THOSE THAT ‘OBJECT TO PROVIDING CARE FOR ‘ILLEGAL ALIENS’ –

I CAN ATTEST THAT THE FOOD IS NOT FIT FOR ANIMALS – there are not enough vegetables to cover the center of your palm, everything is boiled in water, it is high calorie but absolutely no vitamins, people’s hair is falling out, fingernails thin and ridged, skin flaking, all of the signs of deprivation and malnutrition are evident.

THE SIGNAGE ON THE WALLS STATE THAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO LOSE 15-20LBS DURING YOUR INCARCERATION -

IF THE TYPICAL TIME IN DETENTION IS 37.5 DAYS,

So, here you are working at the bank, a twenty year legitimate tax payer, then six guys in black unforms drag you away, and you are dumped in this jail. You are then locked up for, say 108 DAYS like I was, should be expected to lose, 108/37.5 x 17lb, = 50.4lb,

I was a healthy 118lb and 5.3.5 inches when locked up; so I would be, 118-50.4= So I would be DEAD by now if I had not had someone send me money for commissary,
which is all chocolate and garbage like pepperoni….

There was a pakistani girl released because after 18 mths, she said she thinks she was released because she was so thin, and she just wanted to die….but she had won her case, and so was released………and then they told her to come in to Immigration offices to pick up her work permission, her Asylum had been approved, yet when she went to meet them, she was re-arrested and put back in McHenry, and her lawyer had to refight her case to get her released again…..

“The food was horrible and the officials were ignorant,” Hussain said. He opted for the vegetarian diet because he was refused the Kosher, he said, which usually meant leftover mashed potatoes and sweet beans on a tray. Though ICE’s policy regarding religious dietary needs states that facilities are required to provide detainees “reasonable and equitable opportunity to observe their religious dietary practice,” Montenegro said in an email response, the Kosher meals are provided only to Jewish detainees.

A Muslim detainee’s dietary options are the regular meals, which are pork-free, she said, and vegetarian.“They already have the Kosher meal that they give to Jewish inmates,” said Heeren, who works for the Legal Assistance Foundation for Metropolitan Chicago. “Why not give it to the Muslims who have similar dietary beliefs?” The food was not Hussain’s only qualm. He also had difficulty obtaining an Arabic Koran, he said, until a humanitarian aid worker from Chicago brought him one. Though Muslims were allowed to have congregational prayers once a week, there were no visiting Imams for religious counseling. As a result, his time at McHenry was, by far, the worst of his recent years of incarceration, he said.“My religion is all I have in here,” Hussain said, while locked up in Dodge. “It is what sustains me.”

Is Susamma Matthews still alive?

I witnessed the mistreatment of Ms. Susamma Matthews, of India, in McHenry Co. IL Immigration jail, I want to know if she is still alive. Someone please contact me and let me know she is ok.

American Citizens Illegally Detained and Deported

full story by Seth Hoy – thank you, Seth

You probably can’t imagine the horror and frustration of being detained in a jail cell just waiting to be deported—separated from your friends, family and your job—knowing full well you are an American citizen with every right to live in this country. According to a recent AP article, however, this gross injustice has been the reality for literally hundreds of US citizens.

In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has locked up or thrown out dozens, probably many more, of its own citizens over the past eight years. A monthslong AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers say there are actually hundreds of such cases.

This is the part of “illegal” we don’t understand—to answer restrictionists’ signature rhetorical question, “What part of “illegal” don’t you understand?” According to former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Victor Cerda, US citizens end up in detention because the system is inefficient and overwhelmed. And detention numbers are expected to rise as much as 17 percent (or more than 400,000) this year.

So who among us is being detained and deported illegally? Sadly, as is the case for many people who get overlooked and thrown out in our immigration system, it is the poor, children, minorities, the mentally ill and the disenfranchised with the fewest resources and the weakest voices.

The AP followed the case of Pedro Guzman, a 31-year-old Los Angeles native, who is mentally ill and illiterate. Guzman unknowingly signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico—even though Guzman told officers he was a US citizen. Apparently, it didn’t matter.

He is our brother, somebody’s son, that they deported. California is like the main capital of Latin Americans. It doesn’t matter whether you are a citizen or not. If you look Hispanic, they can question you. Deportation can happen to anybody.

And Pedro Guzman isn’t alone. There are literally hundreds of other detention and deportation cases where US citizens are swept up in an immigration raid, forced to sign waivers and illegally detained and deported. The Vera Institute for Justice, for example, found that 322 detainees awaiting removal had citizenship claims in 2007, yet languished in US detention centers because they were too poor to afford adequate representation. Is this really what Americans consider effective immigration enforcement?

The more the system becomes confused, the more U.S. citizens will be wrongfully detained and wrongfully removed,” said Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches at Pepperdine Law School. “They are the symptom of a larger problem in the detention system. … Nothing could be more regrettable than the removal of our fellow citizens.

No one disagrees that our immigration laws need to be enforced, but it’s about time everyone takes a look at the effectiveness of enforcement law and policy, how they’re actually being enforced and who is illegally tangled up in our justice system.

Thankfully, for her part, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has ordered an examination of ICE’s detention and removal operations—but that’s just one side of immigration coin. How many more American citizens and children need to be detained, deported or forced to sign waivers before people start to realize that the disenfranchised could, one day, be you and me? After all, to borrow from Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, what could more un-American than deporting American citizens?

How to Emigrate to America….or not.

For the whole background on how I know these details, read my story at www.josieg6.wordpress.com. And send it on to a friend, thanks!!

McHenry Jail IL is absolutely filthy and freezing, when you flush the toilet, it comes up in the drinking water. I am still covered in an unknown lumpy skin rash, 3 courses of antibiotics and antiviral drugs have not worked. I am in the process of medical testing here in the UK to find out the underlying cause. McHenry Immigration Detention center violates every legal standard and many CDC and EPA rules. I have written detailed complaints to the CDC and EPA and I sent detailed reports of conditions and abuses to my attorney. Detainees have rights, like phone calls etc, BUT you are denied every one of them. If you demand your legal rights, you are locked in your cell for days. The abuse is constant. I was kept awake for days at a time to make me fill out a passport application. I witnessed and documented many abuses.

I was a witness that they nearly Killed Susamma Matthews, from India. Like me, and like Jason Ng, she was waiting for a letter from Immigration. She and her son were arrested and detained. They ask for all of your medications, when you are arrested, then they take them, and you don’t get them; if you really push you are given ’substitute’ medications…these made Susamma very sick. She had diabetes and high blood pressure. She was woken in the night for blood pressure checks, so the readings would be low…and for blood sugar after she ate, so it would look normal. She got a urine infection, this progressed to a Kidney infection – she was shaking in pain, and had lost 10 pounds in ten days…her son was also in custody, her other son is a US Citizen in Florida, he was running around getting another petition together for her…she could not get out of bed, I was disciplined for bringing her water to drink – I made anon calls to the OIG hotline from McHenry, after 3 weeks of this, they came to get her, she couldn’t walk, with another inmate we got her down the stairs, when we got her to the door, they realized that we inmates weren’t going to be allowed to ‘carry her’ so the guard (6ft 4 carrying her pillow case) complained that someone needed to bring a wheelchair…she was taken up to medical, she said they treated her better, IV drugs for 10 days at least…she and I were both told that our requests for stay of removal were denied on 6/30; I know mine didn’t even arrive in their offices until 6/31!! She said she was told that hers was denied because they had already purchased the ticket to fly her home…that day she returned to the day room, finally walking again, that night she was taken at 4am to go to the airport….They do this because they do not want you to die in custody.

Got a true detainee story? Send it to Josieg6@hotmail.com

Immigration Detainee Stories – Pong Young, are you still alive?

www.josieg6.wordpress.com www.condron.us http://www.condron.us/

Pong Young was an elderly Korean woman, stuck in McHenry Immigration jail. She had entered US in approx 1960’s, married to her African American GI husband. He took her to live in a poor black neighborhood in Chicago, and he joined the police force. She said didn’t speak english, and the neighbors hated her, they called her names, and attacked and beat her; she showed me scars and that she lost some of her teeth this way. She told her husband, and he wanted to fight with them, but she begged him not to, as she was afraid he would be killed. After that she either stayed in the house all the time or he drove her to and from work at a grocery store. She only had contact with his family, his sister and mother, who were not pleased that she was Korean. She eventualy worked in the Chicago School system in the Kitchens for nine years.

She said they tried for a baby, she miscarried four times. She said the fifth time she was pregnant she lifted a heavy pan at work, and felt a terrible pain, she went home to lie down. When Terry got home, she got up and she said the baby came out, and died on the floor, at about 5 months. She said Terry took her to the hospital and they gave her emergency surgery. She said she could not have children after that. She said the pain was so bad, that she went to a chinese doctor, who prescribed herbs, she did not know she was taking opium pills, and became addicted. This led to heroin addiction. Terry was drinking a lot, and his health was going down. They were a mess, this went on for a few years. She said her purse was stolen and she lost her green card in it, so she went to get it replaced and a woman at Immigration asked for $100.0 to replace it. Pong got the feeling something wasnt right, so she left and did not try to replace it again.

She said she was arrested when she was sitting in the car with Terry, and the police made it a dealing charge, and so she went to jail as a dealer. She said the heroin she had was for personal use. She did her time in jail, knowing that Terry as an alcoholic with diabetes, was not doing well without her to take care of him. She said he was in a wheelchair now. She waited to be released to go home to help him, they had been married for thirty years, but at the end of her sentence, she was taken from jail to Immigration Jail, to be deported to Korea. Because she now had a conviction, she was stripped of her green card rights. When they took her from jail to Immigration court for a hearing, she had a heart attack in the van on the way, and was hospitalised overnight.

She was terrified Terry would die without her, she was right, he tried to visit her in jail, but the doors were not wide enough for his wheelchair, and the guards would not assist him so she was denied the visit. She tried to reach him by phone, but he had been taken to hospital becuase of his diabetes, she found out what hospital he was in but could not call him from the jail. He went into a coma. He came out of it, and he called her in the jail, but they would not let her take the call, they just told her that he had called. The guards were very unhelpful in finding the right number/address for the jail so she could contact him. They don’t have to give a damn that someone is dying, in or out of the jail. His family were not trying to help them. They had never liked the fact that he had married a Korean woman. She told me she dreamed he was dying without her, she could hear him calling to her for help. She heard that he had come out of the coma and was trying to get on his feet/walk in the hospital, so he could come to see her in the jail.

From jail, she filed for asylum, as in marrying Terry and moving to the States, she had also fled communism and torture in North Korea. The judge at the hearing asked her for more evidence, which an inmate in jail with no support has no way to get. Like a miracle there was an article in the one newspaper we were allowed to read, that covered the conditions in North Korea at the time she left there. She held on to it for the judge at the next hearing.

She was woken in the night, and the guard told her she was going home. She was so excited, she left all of her papers, medical reports evidence and documents in her cell. They held her downstairs, cuffed and shacked her, and put her in the van. They drove her around until 4pm next day. They then led her into a place, she said ‘where is this?’ They said it was a funeral home, she got to see her husband of thirty years, Terry, lying in a Box.

She said he looked like he did thirty years ago, young and smooth skinned. They told her she could not touch him. She was returned to the jail with us at about 7pm. The guard told me to take care of her, they had given her something to make her sleep. We put her in her bunk (we are not allowed to into the cell, so we all watched to make sure she did not fall as she went that last few feet.)

The guard the night before had thrown away everything in her cell. All her medical records, evidence and documents were gone. All her soap, shampoo and bits were gone.

After this, Pong lost interest in life, she only wanted to play a Board game, called ‘Sorry.’  We played with her as much as we could. We called her sister-in-law, who said Pong could stay with them when she got out. The sister in law needed to sign a paper for the asylum to be her sponsor. She never mailed it back, as Pong said, now his family can claim Terry’s military and Police pensions, as Pong will be deported to Korea, a country where she has no one and nothing. Terry was her life and this had killed both of them now.

A Jamaican Green Card holder winds up in Immigration Jail after thirty years..

Margaret Thompson is a Jamaican citizen who lived in the USA on a valid green card for 30 years, she had eight US citizen children, and nine us citizen grandchildren, with whom she spent all of her time, when not working in the Church charity shop. On her return from a family vacation in Jamaica, they took her green card from her. A few months later, she called Immigration, and was told to come in and get it. She was arrested under a law brought in in approx 2001-2, allowing them to arrest any green card holder who had ever had a criminal conviction, even if it was past and served/spent, and they put her in filthy immigration jail.

So – the green card was issued to her when she was 17, she committed a crime years later, admitted guilt and served time, even getting out after five months for good behavior, then years after that, after all those years, kids and grand kids, because of the above new retroactive law, she was stripped of her green card, held in jail, and set for deportation, unable to come home to her family in Chicago for 20 years.

I was in McHenry County Jail with Margaret for four months; she was coming up on a year in that filthy Immigration jail. She was fighting for a pardon from Governor Rod Blagojevich (!!) for this past crime that she served time for years ago, so she could get back to her ordinary life as a grandmother in Chicago, where she had lived for thirty years.

Last I saw Margaret, she was still shivering in this filthy jail. Last I saw Blagojevich, he was being busted by the Feds for corruption, so I think he was too busy to sign Margaret’s pardon so she could go home to her kids and grand kids. (conversely, Slick Rick the Rapper, who served time for murder in New York, was given a Pardon by the New York Governor, so he could keep his green card.)

Last I saw Julie Myers, former Head of ICE, I was asking her to look into my case. One day hopefully someone will look closely at Ms. Myers conduct in office. She may wind up sitting next to A-Rod. There has not been one executive in industry (exception, Nancy Koenig, I was her admin assistant) that I have supported that has not been questioned by the Feds, but all can afford the very best attorneys, unlike immigrants.

Get the details on “>Wikipedia“>Ms. Myers and the questions about her fitness for the job as Head of ICE, at wikipedia. Ms. Myers decided the best way to have the best record of deportations was, instead of going after criminal aliens, who can be hard to catch, to go after everyone on the waiting list, who was waiting at home for a letter from Immigration. (Of course they got me at home, I was not a ‘fugitive alien’ – I have been waiting by the mailbox for twenty years.)

Her agents were sent to terrorize and destroy the lives of hopeful immigrants who have been waiting YEARS for their legitimate papers, by dragging them from their homes or legitimate places of work, and holding them as ‘flight risks’ – what crap and what a waste of my tax dollars. If I had known they were doing this, I would have given up and gone elsewhere in the world.

 

How a Green Card Applicant can die during the Immigration Process.

People trying to emigrate to America legally are being arrested in their homes during the waiting process, shoved into filthy jails, denied medical care and sometimes even allowed to die during detention…..and nobody understands why.

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: February 10, 2009

The widow and children of a Chinese man who died of cancer in immigration custody last summer filed suit in federal court in Providence, charging that detention center guards broke his spine days before his death, then taunted him as he screamed in agony. The civil suit, brought by the family of Hiu Lui Ng with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, names numerous defendants, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation, owner of the jail where Mr. Ng spent his last month, and where federal investigators found he was denied adequate medical care.

U.S. Issues Scathing Report on Immigrant Who Died in Detention
Published: January 15, 2009

Federal immigration officials investigating the death of a New York computer engineer from China who died in their custody last summer said Thursday that supervisors at a Rhode Island detention center had denied the ailing man appropriate medical treatment on multiple occasions and that employees had dragged him from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain.
The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., a locally owned jail where Hiu Lui Ng spent his final month.

As they disclosed their findings, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ordered an end to their contract with the center, the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., a locally owned jail where the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, spent his final month after a year in immigration detention. They said they had asked that the United States attorney in Boston review the case for possible criminal prosecution.

The federal investigation began last summer, soon after The New York Times reported on the death of Mr. Ng, 34. His extensive cancer and fractured spine had gone undiagnosed, despite his pleas for help, until shortly before he died in custody on Aug. 6.

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the federal agency, said the investigation showed that supervisors at the Wyatt detention center had in effect prevented Mr. Ng from meeting with his lawyer by refusing him the use of a wheelchair when he was too ill and in too much pain to walk.

The 33-page investigation report also found that the guards and medical staff, acting on orders of the warden, violated the jail’s policy on the use of force when Mr. Ng was dragged to a van for a trip to Hartford, where his lawyers say he was pressured to withdraw all his appeals and accept deportation.

The jail’s overhead surveillance video cameras captured everything. But another, hand-held camcorder turned on and off 13 times at a signal from the captain in charge, according to the report, created another version of the episode, apparently in an effort to document that Mr. Ng was faking his illness and refusing to go to the hospital for a CT scan.

Investigators interviewed 158 people in the course of their inquiry, but the surveillance videotapes clearly told them most of what they needed to know. At one point, they wrote, the captain cursed Mr. Ng, calling him an idiot, and ordered him to “stop whining.”

Mr. Ng kept saying that he could not walk, begged for a wheelchair, and “continued to scream,” the report said, as he was pulled under his armpits from his bed, and to another part of the jail to be shackled.

John J. McConnell Jr., the lawyer representing Mr. Ng’s family in a planned lawsuit against the jail and the federal immigration agency, called the report “damning” but added that the investigating agency shared the blame because Mr. Ng “should not have been detained in the first place.”

“The people involved in that torturous treatment,” he said, “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Dante Bellini, a spokesman for Wyatt, called the results of the investigation “disappointing.” Last month, citing its investigation, the immigration agency removed all of its detainees from Wyatt.

“We will continue to look at ways to reverse this,” Mr. Bellini said. “We will continue to look at all our options and filling our beds. But we will steadfastly maintain that we had nothing to do with the detainee’s death.”

Last week, Wyatt announced that it was punishing seven employees in connection with the case, with penalties ranging from termination to reprimand. “We took stern and appropriate action,” Mr. Bellini said.

Mr. Ng, who had no criminal record, overstayed a visa years ago and had been applying for a green card through his wife, a United States citizen, when he was taken into detention in July 2007 and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

One of the most harrowing parts of the federal report is its detailed description of the videos made as Mr. Ng was forcibly taken from his cell to a van.

The tape from the hand-held camcorder begins with the captain’s instructing Mr. Ng that “he needed to move on his own,” telling him he would not be given a wheelchair and repeatedly ordering him to stand up.

“Mr. Ng was visibly crying and appeared to have difficulty standing,” the report said, adding that the captain then appeared to signal the officer holding the camcorder to stop recording.

“Mr. Ng asked captain to believe him that he could not move his legs,” the report went on. As he struggled to put on his shoes, apparently in pain, the captain urged him to hurry up. When Mr. Ng told a nurse that he wanted to go to the hospital to take the medical test to determine the cause of his pain and disability, but needed a wheelchair, she was dismissive: “She stated that he could go; he was just refusing to go.”

wonder what the statistics are…

After Ms. Julie Myers short tenure in Office, overseeing the activity of ICE police, and their arrests of ‘fugitive’ aliens, (such as 30 year greencard holder grandmothers at home, etc…) I wonder what the statistics are for lawsuits now filed against ICE, I am guessing there is a large spike for the year 2008…..do these lawsuits settle out of court, are they counted, does the public ever hear about the florida grandmother held in a filthy Illinois jail for 90 days, as they tried to prove she was not a US Citizen…..or the young nurse born in Philadelphia, having a nervous breakdown becuase her judge can’t understand why she is in there, so they kept delaying her court….for months.

6/4/08 – Statement on Immigration Detainee Health Care

THE STATS SHOW THAT DEATH IN ICE CUSTODY RATES INCREASED 29% IN 2007 OVER 2006. WHAT ABOUT 2008?

6/4/08 Statement on Immigration Detainee Health Care
Homer D. Venters, M.D.Attending Physician, Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture
Public Health Fellow, New York University
House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship,
Refugees, Border Security, and International Law

Hearing on Problems with Immigration Detainee Medical Care
June 4, 2008

Good Afternoon. My name is Dr. Homer Venters. I am an attending physician at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture as well as a Public Health Fellow with NewYork University. I am testifying today on behalf of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors ofTorture and the NYU School of Medicine Center for Health and Human Rights. I would like to thank Congresswoman Lofgren and members of the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify on immigrant detainee healthcare. My area of research as a Public Health Fellow is the medical care provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees. Together with my colleague, Dr. Allen Keller (Director of the Torture Survivors Program and the Center for Health and Human Rights) I have conducted analysis of the ICE healthcare system, including the mortality statistics recently released by ICE and the specific provisions of the ICE health plan.

My comments today focus on these two areas and I will provide recommendations for improvements of the ICE healthcare system. The central thesis of my remarks is that behindconfusing and unreliable statistics concerning detainee deaths, the ICE healthcare system contains key elements that may jeopardize detainee health. Contrary to public statements by ICE, it is our conclusion that this health system, and the care it allows for detainees, is getting worse not better.

Misleading Mortality Statistics

I would like to begin with the recent discussion of detainee mortality reported by ICE. I am referring to the ICE fact sheet on detainee deaths dated May 2008 as well as the Op-Ed by Assistant Secretary Myers in the Washington Post.

In these documents, ICE relies on inappropriate use of basic epidemiologic terms and inaccurate comparisons between populations known to be radically different. The lack of standardized mortality or morbidity reported in these documents provokes grave concern for the welfare of ICE detainees and the ability of ICE to monitor the quality of its own health care system.

ICE reports falling detainee ‘mortality’ rates but their figures are based on unreliable calculations. In Fiscal Year 2006 ICE detained approximately 250,000 people while in 2007, that number rose to 310,000. Because the total number of detainee deaths dropped from 17 to 11 during those periods, ICE claims that the mortality rate fell from 6.7 to 3.5 per 100,000 detentions, a 49% decrease.
However this conclusion neglects a very basic and essential issue, – the length of detention. From 2006 to 2007, the average length of ICE detention decreased from 90 days to 37. Adjusting for risk of exposure (such as length of detention) is a fundamental practice of both medicine and epidemiology and failure to do so reflects flawed methodology

For instance, no physician would make conclusions about a patient’s risk from smoking without including how long that patient had been a smoker. Taking ICE’s same fiscal year numbers, but correctly adjusting for average length of detention, it is clear that the length-adjusted mortality Actually increased between 2006 and 2007 from 27 to 34 per 100,000 detention-years, a 29% increase (see Table 1 for side by side comparison).

Consequently, the statistics presented by ICE tend to present an unduly rosy picture of detainee mortality.

A second glaring weakness in the ICE statistics is found in their comparison between deaths of ICE detainees and those in a general prison population. Again, the lack of standardization for length of detention makes this a flawed comparison, since prisoners are typically held for a longer period of time in a given year than are ICE detainees. For example, imagine that ICE detained 300,000 people per year for one day each and U.S. prisons detained 300,000 people each for a full year. It would be incorrect to conclude that because fewer people died in ICE custody than in prison custody, the healthcare provided to ICE detainees was somehow superior.

The fact that the average ICE detainee spends so much less time in custody than the average prisoner in a given year must be factored in to provide any meaningful results.

Aside from lacking standardization over a given year, any comparison of ICE detainees to prisoner populations is dubious because prisoners are incarcerated for much longer periods of time in total than ICE detainees. Prison research has shown that mortality rates increase with time of incarceration, so even if ICE had standardized for time detained in a given year, prisoners who have accumulated years of prior detention are known to have higher rates of mortality.

Also, when ICE favorably compares mortality of detainees to those of prisoners and the general population, there is no adjustment for age or disease prevalence. For example, U.S. prisoners have high rates of infectious disease, and the general U.S. population may be older, suffering from higher rates of heart disease and cancer than the ICE population. Without correct adjustment for these types of possible differences, the figures provided by ICE are unreliable.

To be clear, mortality is an imprecise method for appraising healthcare in a transitional population. Because death is rare and detention is short, mortality likely under-represents problems with health care delivery among ICE detainees. Morbidity, which refers to sickness or having a disease, is a better measure of the efficacy of ICE healthcare since by ICE estimates, at least 34% of detainees suffer from chronic diseases. (Josie note – many detainees such as myself had our own paid for medication with us, it was taken away and if we begged we were given substitute medication that was dangerous)
Consequently, complications from poorly controlled chronic disease, such as diabetes, HIV, asthma or hypertension are more sensitive health care measures. Unfortunately, ICE makes reports no specific information about morbidity of detainees. However, even morbidity may under-represent adverse effects of this system. As with mortality, shorter detentions will tend to produce fewer adverse events. In thinking of ICE detention as a risk factor, as ICE detention time shortens, the likelihood is that adverse events. caused by this risk will occur afterwards. This may have been the case with Juan Guillermo, 37, who was denied his seizure medicines while detained by ICE and died of complications from seizures shortly after being deported to Mexico (could have been me)

This discussion of ICE detainee mortality reveals two important pieces of information.First, the length-adjusted mortality for detainees has increased from 2006 to 2007. The causes or significance of this increase are unclear but it certainly is not the case that detainee mortality is dramatically falling, as ICE has asserted.
Second, the reliance by ICE on unsound statistical methods that consistently present a more positive picture of detainee health should generate concerns about the ability of ICE to adequately assess and improve its own healthcare system.Our review of the ICE health plan, including recent changes, suggests that ICE detainees are receiving medical care that is increasingly limited and inconsistent with current standards of medical practice.

II. An Acute Care Health System for a Population in Need of Much More
Healthcare provided for ICE detainees is directed by a set of rules under the Detention Management Control Program of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This program creates procedures for ICE detention operations but does not carry the force of law. Particular
medical policies and reimbursement guidelines are determined by the Division of immigration Health Services (DIHS), recently incorporated into DHS from the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. DIHS guidelines then become part of the overall set of ICE rules for detention operations.

Despite acknowledging the substantial burden of chronic disease among detainees, the ICE health plan maintains a steadfast focus on an acute care model. The 1/3 of detainees with medical problems that require ongoing, skilled care for problems such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma and HIV find themselves in a medical setting geared towards addressing ankle sprains, cuts and bruises and calling 911 in case of emergency. Unfortunately, the ICE health plan is clearly not crafted to care for a population with significant chronic medical or mental health needs. The introduction of the ICE planexplains “The DIHS Medical Dental Detainee Covered Services Package primarily provides health care services for emergency care. Emergency care is defined as ‘a condition that is threatening to life, limb, hearing or sight

This institutional aversion to caring for detainees with chronic disease is evidenced in recent detainee deaths. One year ago, a 23 year old transgender woman, Victoria Arellano was detained Ms. Arellano had AIDS and was taking a life saving medicine to prevent opportunistic infections that could quickly cause pneumonia and death were she to stop. These medicines essential for people with AIDS and even a brief interruption risks sickness and death for a patient. Despite reporting her medical history and her medication when detained (and throughout her detention), Ms. Arellano was refused her medicine. Over the following weeks, Ms. Arellano developed a cough and fever, which should have prompted hospitalization and evaluation Instead, Ms. Arellano was given an inappropriate antibiotic by the detention center medical staff was still refused her needed medication, and returned to her cell. By the time Ms. Arellano’s cellmates staged a protest to draw attention to her deteriorating condition, she had become very ill and died soon thereafter, comatose and shackled to her bed. Faced with a common chronic disease, ICE medical staff withheld the correct medicines, gave inappropriate medicines and failed to seek more competent care for Ms. Arellano. The care that Ms. Arellano required would be routine in almost any medical clinic or hospital in the United States.

Among the most prevalent chronic diseases from which detainees suffer may be depression and anxiety. The prevalence of these conditions is difficult to gauge in part because detainee may fear being placed in segregation should they report mental health symptoms. This fear was documented in study conducted jointly by the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights in 2003 among asylum seekers (admittedly, a small subset of detainees). This report found that “the mental health of asylum seekers interviewed for thisstudy was extremely poor and worsened the longer that individuals were in detention.” In this study, symptoms of depression were present in 86% of the 70 detained asylum seekers, and anxiety was present in 77% and PTSD in 50%
The study also documented significant difficulties for immigrant detainees accessing health services for painful and sometimes dangerous health problems. Unfortunately, recent reports by the Washington Post and New York Times demonstrate that the problems with detainee healthcare documented in 2003 are notnew and have not been corrected. In fact the concerns are even greater today, given that current immigration policies continue to dramatically expand immigration detention The fear of arbitrary and inhumane segregation is not hypothetical and has real bearing on the health of ICE detainees. In 2007, a 52 year old man from Guinea, Boubacar Bah, fell while in ICE custody and sustained a head injury.
Mr. Bah was transferred to the medical unit of the detention center but when he became agitated, confused and vomited, Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders and transferred to segregation (a euphemistic term for solitary confinement with approval of medical staff. The behavior that served as an excuse for disciplinary transfer to solitary confinement was in reality a sentinel sign of intracranial bleeding. The most shocking aspect of this case is that Mr. Bah was actually in the medical unit, under the care of ICE medical staff when the ill-conceived idea to place him in solitary confinement was approved. Mr. Bah’s condition deteriorated steadily under the watch of ICE personnel until 14 hours after his fall foaming at the mouth and unresponsive, he was transferred to a hospital. Mr. Bah was quickly diagnosed with a fractured skull, multiple spots of bleeding in his brain and ICE notified his family five days later of his condition. Mr. Bah died several months later without ever regaining consciousness and ICE medical staff originally reported his cause of death as ‘aneurysm’ without any mention of his fractured skull. While most detainees who are inappropriately placed in solitary confinement do not die, this case illustrates how very basic medical judgment can be abandoned in the detention setting. A man who had just fallen and lost consciousness, already inside the medical unit, was somehow judged to be ‘disobeying orders’ instead of manifesting a clearly recognizable sign of head trauma. Solitary confinement is obviously inappropriate for someone who is ill, but this case and others call into question the very practice of placingdetainees in such a setting

III. Specific Weakness in the ICE Health Plan Imperil Detainees

In addition to the broad institutional problems facing detainees who require medical care there are very specific aspects of the ICE health plan that warrant concern. DIHS has altered the Covered Services Package several times in the past few years, limiting the scope of medical care for detainees. Publicly reported deaths of detainees have included cases in which persons with chronic diseases were refused access to care outside their respective detention centers
refusal for this care comes in the form of a Treatment Authorization Request submitted by local medical staff at a detention center and denied by DIHS. Before 2005, the Covered Services Package entitled detained with chronic medical problems to ‘chronic care’ visits every three months. In 2005, the Covered Services Package was changed in the following manner: “we have clarified to providers that DIHS does not mandate the frequency a detainee is seen or what testing needs to be done by the onsite physician. The responsibility will lie with the provider.”;
In stark contrast to these recent changes by ICE, there is clear and convincing evidence establishing system-wide protocols for chronic disease diagnosis and treatment (including preapproved visits, tests and treatments) results in decreased mortality and morbidity this change eliminated any notion of standard of care (such as a set protocol for treating specific diseases), and further increased the burden of securing prior approval for outside care, the net effect may have been to limit care for detainees with chronic medical problems.
One tragic example is Francisco Castaneda, a 34 year old man from El Salvador, who was detained for 11 months by ICE with bleeding penile lesions. Despite numerous physicians documenting concern that his lesions were cancerous, DIHS refused the TAR for biopsy labeling the test ‘elective’ After being released from detention, Mr. Castaneda was finally able to receive appropriate evaluation and treatment. But by then it was too late and Mr. Castaneda died shortly after beginning treatment for metastatic penile cancer

Another potential threat to detainee medical care is the requirement of the Covered Services Package that mandates that detention center medical providers include non-medical criteria any potential referral for outside care. The Covered Services Package allows non-emergent care with the following explanation: “Other medical conditions which the physician believes, if untreated during the period of ICE/BP custody, would cause deterioration of the detainee’s health or uncontrolled suffering affecting his/her deportation status will be assessed and evaluated for care With these conditions, ICE simultaneously demands that a care provider estimate the length of detention for a detainee and assess whether or not deterioration of the condition might impact deportation. Both of these non-medical criteria potentially limit the care provided to detainees and likely create ethical (and potentially legal) jeopardy for ICE providers In contrast, the U.S. Marshals Service relies on medical necessity alone in establishing criteria for outside referral

A third problem with the care allowed under the Covered Services Package pertains to health screening. Originally (prior to the 2005 changes), the plan approved basic health screening tests such as mammograms and pap smears only after one year in detention. This guideline was substandard because many detainees likely had little or no prior health screening and would have benefited from indicated health screening tests (as is the standard at Rikers Island Jail in New York City, where average length of stay is shorter than average ICE detention
But even this substandard coverage was further reduced in 2005 when the Covered Services Package substituted diagnostic criteria for what they continued to call screening tests. The new guidelines stated “screening for disease processes (e.g., breast, cervical, prostatic, colorectal cancer) are considered on a case by case basis, subject to clinical findings…In other words, clinical findings must support the need for the requested screening. This change will remove the impression that these tests are automatically approved for a detainee who is in custody for over 12 months Screening tests are by definition, applied to the entire non-symptomatic portion of a population For example, in discussing Pap smears, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recommends screening for cervical cancer in women who have been sexually active and have a cervix There is no reference to symptoms or clinical suspicion in this, or any other screening recommendation and to wait until clinical suspicion or symptoms appear completely undermines the ‘screening’ aspect of the test. This difference is enormously important because while ICE continues to call these tests ‘screening’, they are in fact forcing tens of thousands of people to forgo some of the most beneficial and cost-effective measures of modern medicine. By waiting until detainees show symptoms or arouse clinical suspicion of a disease, ICE deprives detainees of the accepted medical practice of early detection and treatment in favor of letting diseases such as cervical breast and prostate cancer develop to the point of symptoms

A final but critical problem with the ICE health plan involves changes in how each Treatment Authorization Request (TAR) is processed. Prior to changes in 2005, detention centermedical staff could submit a TAR and if it was rejected by DIHS, they could appeal this refusal These appeals were reviewed by a team of 3 DIHS physicians. This formal appeal process was scrapped in 2005 in favor of a ‘grievance’ process that eliminated the physician review component. In addition, in 2007 ICE changed the guidelines for refusing TAR’s so that DIHS nurses could reject a TAR without any input from the DIHS medical director. Such oversight by the medical director was required for rejection of TAR’s prior to this change. The net effect of these two changes is that physicians in detention centers may have their TAR’s rejected by offsite nurses and they have lost the ability to appeal such decisions to a group of physicians

IV. Recommendations

We recommend several specific changes to the DIHS Medical Dental Detainee Covered Services Package as well as to the larger health infrastructure if ICE. Without these changes, we are concerned that all detainees held by ICE face an unacceptably low standard of medical care that will adversely affect their health
1. The DIHS Medical Dental Detainee Covered Services Package must be altered in the following ways:
A. Care for chronic disease must be routinely available and reflect community standards for the care of HIV, diabetes, hypertension and other common chronic diseases. Part of these improvements must include pre-approval for standard foreseeable care

B. Health screening tests must be made available based on prevailing medical standards and any mention of ‘clinical suspicion’ or ‘symptoms’ must be eliminated from criteria for these tests

C. Non-medical criteria must be eliminated from the process of detention center medical staff seeking a TAR for detainees. Specifically, the mandate that ICE providers balance a deteriorating condition and uncontrolled suffering against the ability to deport the detainee or estimate a detainee’s length of detention must be eliminated from the health plan

D. TARs generated by physicians should not be rejected by nurses without review by a physician. Any TAR rejected by DIHS should be open to a genuine appeal ncluding review by physicians

2. ICE should be mandated to report vital health statistics (including deaths, disease complications, accidents and forcible medical actions against detainees) to a body outside DHS with expertise in public health and epidemiology. One possible solution would be to return DIHS to the Health Resources and Services Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services and include an ICE medical monitoring division

3. Detainees with serious medical ailments requiring high levels of care should be routinely considered for parole. The correctional setting is an inefficient and inhumane venue for persons with medical problems requiring high levels of ongoing medical care

>4. Healthcare for ICE detainees must be guaranteed and defined as a matter of law. Many of the deaths reported among ICE detainees involve poor adherence to existing ICE

guidelines. Greater accountability is needed to ensure compliance in healthcare standards across the wide spectrum of detention centers
These improvements will require substantial effort, including financial investment
Currently, ICE argues that the number of medical visits, procedures and overall medical budget ($100 million) demonstrate a high degree of care for detainees. But these details tell us nothing about key factors in care delivery, including delays in treatment and the nature of visits. Several detainee deaths involved delays in care and the explosive increase in immigration detainees has outpaced increases in medical spending. Moreover, $100 million may be a low health carebudget for a system that detains 300,000 people per year. By comparison, Rikers Island Jail in New York City detains roughly half the people annually and on any given day that ICE detains but has spent over $100 million annually on healthcare for over a decade for a population that is generally detained for less time than ICE detainees. Without transparency from ICE on basic health outcomes or costs, ICE’s raw expenditures tell us little about the efficacy of this system of care We believe that the most basic principles of decency and sound medical practice demand that an adequate standard of health care for detainees be legally mandated aggressively enforced and that basic health outcomes among detainees be reported for evaluation outside ICE
Unfortunately, the present response of ICE to the overwhelming evidence of inhumanehealthcare for detainees shows that officials are more concerned with public relations than confronting the grim medical reality suffered daily by immigrants in detention

Table 1.

2006 THE STATS SHOW THAT DEATH IN ICE CUSTODY RATES INCREASED 29% IN 2007 OVER 2006. WHAT ABOUT 2008?

US CITIZENS BEING DETAINED AND DEPORTED….

FLORENCE, Ariz. — Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.
“>Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.
On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release.
“The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes,” Warziniack said in an earlier phone interview from jail. “All I know is that somebody dropped the ball.”

The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.

U.S. citizens who are mistakenly jailed by immigration authorities can get caught up in a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle in which they’re simply not believed.

An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.

Vera initially focused on six facilities where most of the cases surfaced. The organization later broadened its analysis to 12 sites and plans to track the outcome of all cases involving citizens.
Nina Siulc, the lead researcher, said she thinks that many more American citizens probably are being erroneously detained or deported every year because her assessment looked at only a small number of those in custody. Each year, about 280,000 people are held on immigration violations at 15 federal detention centers and more than 400 state and local contract facilities nationwide. Unlike suspects charged in criminal courts, detainees accused of immigration violations don’t have a right to an attorney, and three-quarters of them represent themselves. Less affluent or resourceful U.S. citizens who are detained must try to maneuver on their own through a complicated system.

“It becomes your word against the government’s, even when you know and insist that you’re a U.S. citizen,” Siulc said. “Your word doesn’t always count, and the government doesn’t always investigate fully.”

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don’t track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

“We don’t want to detain or deport U.S. citizens,” said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. “It’s just not something we do.” (this is exactly something they do, as in this effing article!!)

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen who was born in Los Angeles, was serving a 120-day sentence for trespassing last year when he was shipped off to Mexico. Guzman was found three months later trying to return home. Although federal government attorneys have acknowledged that Guzman was a citizen, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Thursday that her agency still questions the validity of his birth certificate.

Last March, ICE agents in San Francisco detained Kebin Reyes, a 6-year-old boy who was born in the U.S., for 10 hours after his father was picked up in a sweep. His father says he wasn’t permitted to call relatives who could care for his son, although ICE denies turning down the request.

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants (AND LEGAL IMMIGRANTS!!) who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.

The attorneys said the chances of mistakes are growing as immigration agents step up sweeps in the country and state and local prisons with less experience in immigration matters screen more criminals on behalf of ICE.
ICE’s Fobbs said agents move as quickly as possible to check stories of people who claim they’re American citizens. But she said that many of the cases involve complex legal arguments, such as whether U.S. citizenship is derived from parents, which an immigration judge has to sort out.

“We have to be careful we don’t release the wrong person,” she said.
In Warziniack’s case, ICE officials appear to have been oblivious to signs that they’d made a serious mistake.

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine. Court officials were skeptical. Not only did his story seem preposterous, but the longtime heroin addict also had a Southern accent and didn’t speak Russian.
Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia. Before Warziniack was sentenced to prison on the drug charge, his probation officer surmised in a report that he could be mentally ill.

Although it took only minutes for McClatchy to confirm with Minnesota officials that a birth certificate under Warziniack’s name and birth date was on file, Colorado prison officials notified federal authorities that Warziniack was a foreign-born prisoner. McClatchy also was able to track down Warziniack’s three half-sisters. Even though they hadn’t seen him in almost 20 years, his sisters were willing to vouch for him.
One of them, Missy Dolle, called the detention center repeatedly, until officials there stopped returning her calls. (HE COULD HAVE DIED IN THERE) Her brother’s attorney told her that a detainee in Warziniack’s situation often has to wait weeks for results, even if he or she gets a copy of a U.S. birth certificate.

Warziniack, meanwhile, waited impatiently for an opportunity to prove his case. After he contacted the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a group that provides legal advice to immigrants, a local attorney recently agreed to represent him for free.

Dolle and her husband, Keith, a retired sheriff’s deputy in Mecklenburg County, N.C., flew to Arizona from their Charlotte home to attend her brother’s hearing before an immigration judge. Before she left, she e-mailed Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. After someone from his office contacted ICE, immigration officials promised to release Warziniack if they got a birth certificate.

After scrambling to get a power of attorney to obtain their brother’s birth certificate, the sisters succeeded in getting a copy the day before the hearing.

On Thursday, however, government lawyers told an immigration judge during a deportation hearing that they needed a week to verify the authenticity of Warziniack’s birth record. The judge delayed his ruling.
“I still can’t believe this is happening in America,” Dolle said.
Warziniack began to weep when he saw his sister. “They still don’t believe me,” he said.
Later that day, however, ICE officials changed their minds and said that he could be released this week. They said they were able to confirm his birth certificate, but they didn’t acknowledge any problem with the handling of the case.
The officials blamed conflicting information for the mix-up.
“The burden of proof is on the individual to show they’re legally entitled to be in the United States,” said ICE spokeswoman Kice.
Warziniack, 40, told McClatchy that he has no memory of telling anyone he was Russian. Instead, he recalled the shock of withdrawing from his heroin addiction after 18 years of drug abuse.
Katherine Sanguinetti, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, suspects that prison officials were relying on information that Warziniack gave when he was first taken into custody because they never received the Colorado court documents concluding that he was a U.S. citizen.
Even now, the prison records inaccurately show his current location as “the Soviet Union.”
In the end, Sanguinetti said, ICE is responsible for making sure that it detains and deports the correct person. Her prisons flag hundreds of prisoners a month as foreign-born, but can’t possibly verify the information, she said.

“Could it happen again? Sure,” Sanguinetti said. “But we would hope that ICE during their investigative process would discover the truth.”
Rachel Rosenbloom, an attorney at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College who’s identified at least seven U.S. citizens whom ICE has mistakenly deported since 2000, believes that the agency should set up a more formal way of handling detainees when they appear to have valid claims of U.S. citizenship. At the very least, she said, ICE could release people such as Warziniack on bond while waiting for immigration judges to hear the cases.

“It’s like finding innocent people on death row,” Rosenbloom said. “There may be only a small number of cases, but when you find them you want to do everything in your power to make sure they get out.”
(Researcher Tish Wells contributed.)

9-28-09 Unnamed writes his story.

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:41:44 -0700
From: EMAIL WITHHELD
Subject: Re. My story: Not enough prosecution…….
To: josieg6

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

My children are born in the USA. All they knew before being deported ever so zealously from ICE was the American way of living. My oldest son was an excellent second grader and my youngest a kindergartener. They were living a happy life in America until forced out into a world of doom, despair and uncertainty.

THE ARREST

-For six hours I was almost out of air with hands cuffed back sitting in the pitch black darkness at the back seat of a locked ICE SUV(I still got the scars in my wrists),worried sick about the condition of my wife who was held in a different car. I spent a day and a half in a holding cell full of human hair and feces no shoes on, my feet sticking on the dried urine on the floor at the Dearborn Police Station and after a total loss of human dignity, after being transported handcuffed and shackled like the most wanted of criminals, after the prison check-in (getting totally undressed, bending over and coughing while bent so that a guard can look in your rectum and determine if there’s something hidden in there),after the initial orientation where I learned that I might get an incurable deadly contagious disease while in prison I was thrown into a world of hate, total degradation, injustice, abuse, constant hunger and insults.

THE IMPRISONMENT-CALHOUN COUNTY CORRECTIONAL CENTER MICHIGAN

– One of the toilets is back flowing continuously and the bathroom floor has sewer water for days. We walk on it and there’s no way of washing our feet. Plumbers show up one day but soon after the toilets are back flowing again. The water from the water fountain tastes rusty and warm and there is a foul smell coming from the drinking fountain drain.

It also backflows when the toilets flush.
– I was not given new underwear and was not allowed to keep mine ‘cause it was not all white so for two weeks all I had on me was the orange jail issued uniform which after I washed at the bathroom sink I dried on my body heat. Only after I bought underwear and socks from commissary (two weeks after) I was able to send my orange uniform to the jail laundry and it came back smelling worse and with unrecognizable stains and smell so I washed my underwear, my towels and uniform by hand during all my stay in jail for fear of contagious infection and disease.
– Every day inmates wake up with blood and snot in their noses, and sores. The air vents in the cells are very dirty. Dust is blown around, with particles clearly visible. There are two ten foot brown stains on the ceiling corresponding to the two air ducts on the upper part of the wall. There is asbestos on the cell. The dirty air is making everyone sick. The temperature of the holding pod is extremely low for weeks on end. Most of the inmates are staying in the corners and lying in their beds covered head to toe and wearing all of the issued clothing which is far from enough to keep warm. One night I was hit with the flashlight from a guard during head-count because I was covered head to toe with my thin blanked. I was so cold shaking with high fever and on terrible pain. A large blister has developed on my upper lip and nose as I had high fever for ten days. I complained to the guards about the air temperature and was sent to segregation for 24 hours.
– Inmates are given different types of cleaning solutions as well as bleach to refill the spray bottles used for cleaning the dayrooms and the cells. The bottles of chemicals listed as ‘Henry Cabay and Sons, IL’ clearly state ‘if the contents come into contact with your skin, wash with cold water for 20 minutes and call the poison control center’. No gloves were given to inmates.
– Detainees are brought straight from the airport and put into the general population with no quarantine. Medical testing is done after the fact, several days later, or not done at all. Some people have large reactions, nothing is done. My first physical happened ten days after my arrest and although I complained of strong pain in my body and continuous headaches nothing is done. I had lost 16 lb on ten days. I barely slept because of stress. Suicide was constantly on my mind. I was diagnosed with a severe form of PTSD in 2001 and during medical I requested anti-stress medicine. None was given.
– The food trays are extremely dirty; my orange colored plastic spoon/fork has so many black scratches, bite marks and stubborn filth one would think it was used to dig in the ground. The food is unrecognizable, malnutritive and full of impotence drugs Everybody has constant hunger, diarrhea is rampant and I am still covered in an unknown lumpy rash from my neck down my throat, back, chest, and arms. Commissary food is lowest quality pepperoni, candy and popcorn some of it expired. The guards would sometime show to our pod’s door chewing on big chunks of fried chicken and poke fun at what might have been the look of poor, starving skeletons drooling at the sight of real food.
– I had developed a rash on my throat, neck, shoulders, back, chest, lumps with white pus-filled heads, bursting, white spots on my skin front and back. I had regularly seen a Doctor before my arrest and detainment; I had none of these medical problems. Even at present time I am still covered in these lumps and white spots with new ones coming up.

- At Orientation the first day at Calhoun County Correctional Center all detainees are informed of deadly, incurable and contagious diseases that exist on this facility’s population and all one can do is just hope and pray that does not get infected.

-Abuse is constant: a detainee was kicked several times by a guard for failing to stand up (he has a long history of kidney stones and at the moment and was laying on the floor in acute pain).Being the only literate and fluent English and Spanish speaker on a group of 40 detainees I was warned by a guard to “be careful and not try to be a hero” for helping others to fill out court paperwork and translations. When I still helped other detainees I was targeted by the guards. .Mr.Burraj was verbally and physically threatened by the deportation officer when he did not sign the deportation papers. One inmate went on hunger strike to protest the horrible conditions and was dragged way from the guards to the “hole”. A few days later he was found unresponsive in a solitary cell. The Guards used divide and conquer manners (having a group of usually two” privileged detainees” which did the necessary dirty work including starting fights or harm other targeted inmates).There was a strip search and we were woken in the middle of the night and made to undress and line up on the wall with the guards yelling at us. For long minutes we stood naked on the freezing temperatures while the guards were having fun commenting on our genitals. From other immigrants that have been there a long time I hear stories of a detainee’s death early in ’08.The guards yell constantly and their sentences to us usually and with “f***ing immigrants” and other insults. Our lives are at the mercy of the guards’ mood.

–Never saw the Law Library or the Gym (if there was any) and our recreation time never exceeded 45 minutes a day with the exception of one day when the guard completely forgot and left us locked out for almost three hours. There was no posting of detainee rights anywhere in the holding pod and no legal advice. Three of the detainees that I filled paperwork for had a claim to citizenship yet were deported. Many others had the right to file for asylum and fight their case in Court but were told to pick the fast deportation option so that they would be on their way home soon. Another detainee has spent over 60 days in jail because he did not have the $180 application fee and his hearing kept being postponed.

-My mail was read continuously and from 30 or more letters that I sent out only two were actually received. A few envelopes that make it thru to me are open.

THE DEPORTATION-

I was arrested a very decent, well dressed young men and when I was escorted to the airport I looked like a starved zombie fresh out of the grave. We were a party of seven people flying out of the States of which four were US citizens (two escorting ICE officers and both my kids) all expenses kindly taken care of from ICE. In Budapest I was handed a ten year ban of return and told to sign it.

THE RESULT

I came to America convinced that I was persecuted and looking for freedom. My political asylum claim was also motivated in no small part from my first immigration attorney and my then ignorance of the English Language and therefore the Immigration Law. After a long legal battle and well over $35 000 in legal fees, my asylum case was denied for “not having enough prosecution” the real reason being incompetent counsel (my attorney did not even communicate me the date of the hearing of my appeal in the Seventh Circuit Court so I was not present on the most important Court hearing of my family’s life. I was totally in the dark of the outcome and only learned about it and just after a routine call to her four months after the fact when any possibility of appeal or motion to reopen was inexistent).I hired a different attorney to attempt a Motion to Reopen (Ineffective Counsel being the reason) My attorney could not even get a copy of my case from the BCIS although he filed under the FOIA. (In aunt Zeituni’s case the Service was much more cooperative). So the unfortunate folks that go through the abyss of the asylum process which are by far the most prosecuted, mistreated and forthcoming part of the whole undocumented immigrant population totally exhausted mentally, emotionally and financially are the primary target for deportation and subjected to yet another nightmarish ordeal.

I loved America, I still do and I always will. I would fight for America given the chance. I tried to enlist in the Army in late 2001 but I was turned away because of my immigration status. But love for my children’s country which I consider my own and which I contributed for 10 years of my life does not convert to any form of relief.

At the end, after considering what I went through in America’s Jails without ever being accused of any wrongdoing, no criminal record, not even having a parking ticket while paying all my taxes (I still pay although deported), after enduring sheer madness (I will never be able to erase the painful images off my mind and the marks and lumps off my body) I can definitely state that I totally agree with the Immigration Judge in his thoughtful decision regarding my asylum case:

I really did not have enough prosecution!

Ms.Gates please let me know what you think and whom should I send it to. I would really appreciate any comments or ideas. Best regards E.E.
P.S I could not remember the guard’s names; I was in so much stress and despair.

Josie Gates – this was sentto me by E.E. who wishes to come home with his children.It is his words. The similarities to my confinement, exposure to chemicals and treatment by ICE are remarkable.

Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo – Nina Bernstein, NY TIMES

Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo Xiu Ping Jiang, in an undated photo, has spent more than a year in jail and faces deportation. Her illness has complicated the process.

Nina Bernstein, NY TIMES: Published: May 3, 2009
Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.

Ms. Jiang’s sisters, Yun, left, and Yu, who both live in New York, have been fighting to have her freed and have watched her condition deteriorate in jail. “I’m afraid my sister will commit suicide in the detention,” said Yun, who said Ms. Jiang was too ill to recognize her when she visited in February.
“Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.

She was a waitress with no criminal record, no lawyer and a history of attempted suicide. Her reply to the judge’s threat, captured by the court transcript, was in imperfect English. “Sir, I not — cannot go home,” she said, referring to China, which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at 20. “If I die, I die America.”

The judge moved on. “The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear,” he said for the record. And as she declared, “I’m going to die now,” he entered an order deporting her to China, and sent her back to the Glades County immigration jail.

That exchange, and her bleak experience in the immigration enforcement system, have come to light only through a fluke. Ms. Jiang happens to bear the same name as the ex-wife of Jiverly Wong, the United States citizen from Vietnam who fatally shot 13 people in April at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y. As reporters tried to find the ex-wife, a database search for her name turned up court records about Ms. Jiang, the waitress.

Now 35, she has spent more than a year in jail, often in solitary confinement, sinking deeper into the mental illness that makes it impossible for her either to fight deportation or to obtain the travel documents needed to make it happen, according to a pending habeas corpus petition that seeks her release. It contends that she is suicidal, emaciated and deprived of proper medical treatment.

Had she been the Xiu Ping Jiang linked to a mass killer, her story would have made instant news around the world. Instead, she is a kind of Internet-era doppelganger, lost in one of the dark places of immigration law, where the only life at stake may be her own.

“I’m afraid my sister will commit suicide in the detention,” said her older sister, Yun, 37, who found Ms. Jiang too ill to recognize her when she visited the jail in February.

Ms. Jiang’s journey — from a village in China to restaurants in Brooklyn to a bare jail cell in South Florida (as far from family and help as possible to destroy her- Josie) in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — illustrates the vulnerability of the mentally ill in the immigration system, advocates say.

“It’s a really stark, really dire issue, and it’s a growing problem,” said Sunita Patel, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York who is part of an international working group of legal advocates and mental health providers seeking more protective rules. No one keeps count of such cases, but she added that “with all these enforcement measures being put into place by ICE, more and more people with mental illness are being put into the detention system. And sometimes these people disappear.”

Federal immigration officials said they could not comment on an individual case. But Elaine Komis, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, said there were no rules for determining competency in deportation proceedings, and no way to ensure representation for a mentally ill person facing deportation.

“There is no right to government-paid representation in immigration court,” Ms. Komis said in a statement, “so no attorney is appointed when a respondent is believed to be incompetent.”

The nation’s immigration detention practices are under a comprehensive review ordered by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said a spokesman for the agency, Richard Rocha, adding, “ICE recognizes the need to address mental health issues among its detainees.”

(FALSE DETAINMENT CREATES MENTAL ILLNESS _80% OF DETAINEESS SHOW SIGNS OF MENTAL ILLNESS WHEN THEY ARE FINALLY RELEASED_ DUE TO THE METHODS OF SOFT TORTURE DURING INCARCERATION, ONE STEP UP FROM GUANTANAMO – SEVERAL STEPS DOWN FROM REGULAR OR FEDERAL JAIL)

The exact nature of Ms. Jiang’s illness is unknown, and immigration authorities would not release her medical records, even to her lawyers, saying she had refused to sign a privacy release. Her two sisters, who live in New York, describe her as a sweet, quiet woman whose mind broke under the strain of life as an illegal immigrant seeking asylum.

She was traveling to Florida to start a job at a Chinese restaurant in December 2007 when immigration agents arrested her at a Greyhound bus station in West Palm Beach on suspicion that she was in the country without a visa.

She was luckier than many mentally ill detainees. After Judge Ford issued an order of deportation in January 2008, Ms. Jiang’s older sister, now a United States citizen, hired a lawyer who managed to have it overturned by the Board of Immigration Appeals last May. But Ms. Jiang had to face the same judge in July, and by then, after half a year in jail, her symptoms of mental illness had become so severe that she was unable or unwilling to communicate with the lawyer. He withdrew from the case
She was on her own at a November hearing before a second immigration judge, Scott G. Alexander, who again ordered her deported and again returned her to jail, after noting that a government psychiatrist had deemed her competent to participate in the hearing. The record shows that she sat through the hearing in silence, her arms folded, her eyes downcast.

Yun Jiang, holding a picture of Jiverly Wong, and Yu Jiang with their lawyer, Theodore Cox.
In February, Ms. Jiang’s sisters — one a waitress, one a cashier — found Theodore Cox, a New York immigration lawyer, who took the case without fee. So far, he and his associate, Andrew Wong, have not had much success with their emergency habeas petition, filed in March in federal court in Fort Myers, Fla.

In the last dozen years, immigration laws have sharply narrowed the grounds for federal court review of such cases, and a federal magistrate judge directed Ms. Jiang’s lawyers to remove all allegations concerning her arrest, medical care, conditions of confinement and the denial of opportunity to apply for asylum protection at her hearing. Their motion urging reconsideration has not been answered.

The one issue the court seems prepared to review is whether Ms. Jiang is being unconstitutionally subjected to indefinite detention, defined under a 2001 Supreme Court decision as more than six months. But the six-month clock begins to run only after the final order of removal, which was in November 2008 in Ms. Jiang’s case. And a deportation officer stopped the clock in January, the lawyers said, because Ms. Jiang would not speak with immigration agents seeking a travel document for her.

Ms. Jiang goes without eating for days, or vomits after meals for fear of poison; she mumbles to herself and tears up letters from her family, the petition says. While her risk of dying in detention seems to grow each day, her sisters say, they also fear that she will die if she were deported to China, since nobody there is able to take care of her.

“To save her, I would change places with my sister,” her sister Yun proposed in an interview at Mr. Cox’s law office, speaking through a translator. “Take me to detention.”

In their home village in Fujian Province, in southeastern China, the sisters said, Ms. Jiang was married under age. She hid in their mother’s house when she was pregnant with her second son, they said, because under China’s one-child policy, the village government would have forced her to have an abortion.

“She did not deliver in a hospital, and she almost died,” said the younger sister, Yu, 33, the first to emigrate. A few days after the birth, she added, officials found Ms. Jiang, sterilized her and imposed a heavy fine. Later, divorced and desperate, Ms. Jiang borrowed the equivalent of $35,000 to be smuggled by boat to the United States, hoping to find political asylum and bring over the young sons she left with their grandmother.

But grueling months at sea left her emotionally fragile, and in the summer of 1997, about a year after her arrival, she became so despondent about her separation from her children, and the burden of her debts, that she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, her sisters said. The police took her to Bellevue Hospital Center.

“She was afraid of being arrested, so the next day she ran away,” Yu recalled.

At times over the next decade Ms. Jiang seemed better, as she moved from work in Manhattan garment factories to waitress jobs in Chinese restaurants across the country. But an effort to bring her younger son into the United States through Canada when he was 8 or 9 backfired: he was caught by Canadian officials and placed in foster care.

“He intended to join up with her,” the younger sister said of the boy, now 16. “Now it’s impossible, because he’s being adopted.”

By the winter of 2007, Ms. Jiang’s mental illness had cost her many jobs, the sisters said, but as a favor, some of their former employers would still hire her. She had lost a job in Alabama and was on her way to another in Florida when immigration agents stopped her.

One of the mysteries of Ms. Jiang’s life remains a brief marriage in Des Moines to a Vietnamese man. Her sisters said the family had never even learned his name because she was ashamed to talk about the episode. When they learned from a reporter in April that a woman named Xiu Ping Jiang had been married to the Binghamton gunman, they were seized by doubt: Could this have been their sister’s Vietnamese husband?

They made a flurry of phone calls, then raced through Chinatown streets in the rain to show a photo of the killer to Ms. Jiang’s former boss from Des Moines, who was visiting New York. But he took one look and said with finality, “That’s not him.”

By then, the sisters seemed to have been hoping for a different verdict, for a link that could suddenly turn the world’s gaze to their Xiu Ping Jiang — long enough, at least, to save her from the dark.

I HOPE SHE SURVIVES, BUT SHE WILL NEVER RECOVER. HOMELAND SECURITY HAVE DONE THE SAME AS THE NAZIS DID.
SHAME ON THEM ALL.

Wyatt Earp Syndrome in the New Nazis, ICE, DHS and the Private Prison System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.[1]

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited “genuine” sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating,[2] and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.[3]

Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo’s former college friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr wrote in 1981 that the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.[4]
Goals and methods
Zimbardo and his team set out to test the idea that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards were summarily key to understanding abusive prison situations. Participants were recruited and told they would participate in a two-week “prison simulation.” Of the 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.

The “prison” itself was in the basement of Stanford’s Jordan Hall, which had been converted into a mock jail. An undergraduate research assistant was the “warden” and Zimbardo the “superintendent”. Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalisation and deindividualisation.

The researchers provided weapons — wooden batons — and clothing that simulated that of a prison guard — khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.

Prisoners wore ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, and were required to carry a beachball at all times, rendering them constantly uncomfortable. Guards called prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name. Anytime a guard wanted, he could send a selected prisoner across the street to a jiffy mart to get a snack. A chain around their ankles reminded them of their roles as prisoners.

The researchers held an “orientation” session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they were told that they could not physically harm the prisoners. In The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003, Zimbardo is seen telling the guards, “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”

The participants chosen to play the part of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. At the prison, they were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.

[edit] Results
The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition. By the experiment’s end, many showed severe emotional disturbances.

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards volunteered to work extra hours and worked together to break the prisoner revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff.

A false rumor spread that one of the prisoners, who asked to leave the experiment, would lead companions to free the rest of the prisoners. The guards dismantled the prison and moved the inmates to another secure location. When no breakout attempt occurred, the guards were angry about having to rebuild the prison, so they took it out on the prisoners.

Guards forced the prisoners to count off repeatedly as a way to learn their prison numbers, and to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts as another method to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, made worse by the guards refusing to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate. As punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the spartan prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to go nude as a method of degradation, and some were subjected to sexual humiliation, including simulated homosexual sex.

Zimbardo cited his own absorption in the experiment he guided, and in which he actively participated as Prison Superintendent. On the fourth day, some prisoners were talking about trying to escape. Zimbardo and the guards attempted to move the prisoners to the more secure local police station, but officials there said they could no longer participate in Zimbardo’s experiment.

Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued. Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.

Zimbardo argued that the prisoner participants had internalized their roles, based on the fact that some had stated that they would accept parole even with the attached condition of forfeiting all of their experiment-participation pay. Yet, when their parole applications were all denied, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalized the prisoner identity, they thought themselves prisoners, hence, they stayed.

Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him in a closet and called it solitary confinement.[5] The guards used this incident to turn the other prisoners against No. 416, saying the only way he would be released from solitary confinement was if they gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.

Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks’ duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was shut down.

[edit] Conclusions
The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only six days after it began instead of the fourteen it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment’s result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behaviour rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants’ behaviour, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.

Shortly after the study had been completed, there were bloody revolts at both the San Quentin and Attica prison facilities, and Zimbardo reported his findings on the experiment to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.

[edit] Criticism of the experiment
The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and unscientific. Current ethical standards of psychology would not permit such a study to be conducted today. The study would violate the American Psychological Associate Ethics Code, the Canadian Code of Conduct for Research Involving Humans, and the Belmont Report. Critics including Erich Fromm challenged how readily the results of the experiment could be generalized. Fromm specifically writes about how the personality of an individual does in fact affect behavior when imprisoned (using historical examples from the Nazi concentration camps). This runs counter to the study’s conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual’s behavior. Fromm also argues that the amount of sadism in the “normal” subjects could not be determined with the methods employed to screen them.

Because it was a field experiment, it was impossible to keep traditional scientific controls. Dr Zimbardo was not merely a neutral observer, but influenced the direction of the experiment as its “superintendent”. Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment would be difficult for other researchers to reproduce.

One of the most abused prisoners, #416, and the guard known as “John Wayne”, who was one of the most abusive guards, confront each other in an “encounter session” two months later.Some of the experiment’s critics argued that participants based their behavior on how they were expected to behave, or modelled it after stereotypes they already had about the behavior of prisoners and guards. In other words, the participants were merely engaging in role-playing. Another problem with the experiment was certain guards, such as “John Wayne”, changed their behavior because of wanting to conform to the behavior that they thought Zimbardo was trying to elicit. In response, Zimbardo claimed that even if there was role-playing initially, participants internalized these roles as the experiment continued.

Additionally, it was criticized on the basis of ecological validity. Many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary and may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming “prisoners”, not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names. Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and that it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the “prisoners” in the proper frame of mind; however, it is difficult to know how similar the effects were to an actual prison, and the experiment’s methods would be difficult to reproduce exactly so that others could test them.

Some said that the study was too deterministic: reports described significant differences in the cruelty of the guards, the worst of whom came to be nicknamed “John Wayne.” (This guard alleges he started the escalation of events between “guards” and “prisoners” after he began to emulate a character from the Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke. He further intensified his actions because he was nicknamed “John Wayne” though he was trying to mimic actor Strother Martin who played the role of the sadistic “Captain” in the movie.[6]) Most of the other guards were kinder and often did favors for prisoners. Zimbardo made no attempt to explain or account for these differences.

Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words “prison life.” It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior.

Additionally, the sample size was very small, with only twenty-four participants taking part over a relatively short period of time. This reality means that it is difficult to generalize across a wider scale.

Finally, the study was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.[citation needed] Lacking peer-review, it is difficult to interpret the meaningfulness of the results.

[edit] Haslam and Reicher
Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher (2003), psychologists from the University of Exeter and University of St Andrews, conducted the BBC Prison Study[7], a partial replication of the experiment with the assistance of the BBC, who broadcast scenes from the study in a documentary program called The Experiment. Their results and conclusions differed from Zimbardo’s and led to a number of publications on tyranny, stress and leadership (moreover, unlike results from the SPE, these were published in leading academic journals; e.g., British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly). While their procedure was not a direct replication of Zimbardo’s, their study does cast further doubt on the generality of his conclusions. Specifically, it questions the notion that people slip mindlessly into role and the idea that the dynamics of evil are in any way banal. Their research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of tyranny (of the form displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment).[8][9]

[edit] Comparisons to Abu Ghraib
When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was published in March 2004, many observers immediately were struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment — among them, Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government efforts shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to “a few bad apples” rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.

Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing Abu Ghraib prison guard Staff Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick. He had full access to all investigation and background reports, testifying as an expert witness in SSG Frederick’s court martial, which resulted in an eight-year prison sentence for Frederick in October 2004.

Zimbardo drew on the knowledge he gained from participating in the Frederick case to write The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007), dealing with the striking similarities between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Abu Ghraib abuses.[5]

[edit] Similar incidents
In April 2007, it was reported[10] that high-school students in Waxahachie, Texas who were participating in a role-playing exercise fell into a similar abusive pattern of behavior as exhibited in the original experiment.

In 2002, as mentioned above, the BBC conducted a similar experiment in The Experiment.

[edit] In multimedia
in 1977, Italian director Carlo Tuzii adapted the story of the experiment to an Italian environment and Italian students and made a film out of his adaption, called La Gabbia (The Cage). In the film, “prisoners” and “guards” were all together in a huge room, parted in two halves by a row of iron bars in the middle, and with a small window in each half.
In 1992, a documentary about the experiment was made available via the Stanford Prison Experiment website. The documentary, Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment, was written by Zimbardo and directed and produced by Ken Musen.[11]
The novel Black Box by Mario Giordano, inspired by the experiment, was adapted to cinema in 2001 by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel into the movie Das Experiment.
A 30 minute 2002 BBC documentary produced and directed by Kim Duke.
Breathing Room, a 2008 horror film.
Episode 4 of season 2, Not for Nothing, of Life was loosely based on the Stanford prison experiment.
A film about the experiment, entitled The Stanford Prison Experiment, is currently in production by Maverick Films. It was written by Christopher McQuarrie and Tim Talbott is said to feature actors Channing Tatum, Cam Gigandet, Paul Dano, Ryan Phillippe, Giovanni Ribisi, Benjamin McKenzie, Charlie Hunnam, Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, and Dylan Purcell, and is slotted for release in 2009.
In the episode My Big Fat Greek Rush Week of the series Veronica Mars, Wallace and Logan take part in an experiment that is similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

[edit] See also
Archives of the History of American Psychology, facility that has in its collection prison gowns used in the experiment and other items, including a door from a jail cell.
Das Experiment, a 2001 German film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, inspired by the Stanford events.
The Third Wave, a 1967 recreation of Nazi Germany by high school teacher Ron Jones.
The Wave, a novel by Todd Strasser based on the incident.
The Wave, a short film based on the incident.
The Wave, a 2008 feature film based on the incident.
Milgram experiment on obedience to authority.
Peer pressure
Lord of the Flies, a 1954 novel by William Golding, in which a group of youths degrade into dictatorship.
The Dispossessed, a 1974 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which the protagonist Shevek took the part of a jail guard in a childhood game with very similar conditions and outcome.
Infinite Ryvius, a 1999 animated series by Sunrise, in which 500 young people in an isolated environment go through several power regimes with different levels of oppressiveness and brutality.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, a book by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses this experiment.
Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse
My Big Fat Greek Rush Week, an episode of the Veronica Mars television series depicting an experiment modeled on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
When I Was Ming the Merciless a science fiction short story by Gene Wolfe, discusses an experiment similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Life an NBC TV series alluded to this experiment with the episode “Not for Nothing” in which a murder takes place during a similar experiment.
Banality of Evil

[edit] Footnotes
1.^ Slideshow on official site
2.^ Stanford University News Service – The Standard Prison Experiment
3.^ Stanford Prison Experiment – Conclusion.
4.^ Peters, Thomas, J.,, Waterman, Robert. H., “In Search of Excellence”, 1981. Cf. p.78 and onward.
5.^ a b The Lucifer Effect website
6.^ “John Wayne” (name withheld). Interview. “The Science of Evil.” Primetime. Basic Instincts. KATU. 3 Jan. 2007.
7.^ The BBC Prison Study
8.^ see interviews at http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,,1605313,00.html and http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/interviews/experiment.htm
9.^ for details of the BBC Prison study see http://bbcprisonstudy.org/
10.^ Holocaust Lesson Gets Out Of Hand, http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/jews-and-germans-lesson-gets-out-of-hand/2007/04/11/1175971162172.html
11.^ Justice videos

[edit] References
Carnahan, C. & McFarland, S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 5, 603-614.
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews, 9, 1–17. Washington, DC: Office of Naval Research
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.
Haslam, S. Alexander & Reicher, Stephen (2003). Beyond Stanford: Questioning a role-based explanation of tyranny. Dialogue (Bulletin of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology), 18, 22–25.
Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. G. (1991). Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study. Videorecording. Stanford, CA: Psychology Dept., Stanford University.
Reicher, Stephen., & Haslam, S. Alexander. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial No. 15, 1971-10-25). Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3, of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner’s Rights: California. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Zimbardo, P. G (2007) Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Interview transcript. “Democracy Now!”, March 30, 2007. Accessed March 31, 2007

[edit] External links
Official Site
Homepage of Philip Zimbardo
Stanford Prison Experiment on Film- Penn State Media Sales
Summary of the experiment
Zimbardo, P. (2007). From Heavens to Hells to Heroes. In-Mind Magazine.
Fromm’s criticism of the experiment
The official website of the BBC Prison Study
The Experiment (IMDb) — German movie (Das Experiment) from 2001 inspired by the Stanford Experiment
The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment — Criticism from Carlo Prescott, ex-con and consultant/assistant for the experiment
The Artificial Prison of the Human Mind Article with Comments.
Philip Zimbardo on Democracy Now! March 30 2007
Philip Zimbardo on The Daily Show, March, 2007
Abu Ghraib and the experiment:

BBC News: Is it in anyone to abuse a captive?
BBC News: Why everyone’s not a torturer
Ronald Hilton: US soldiers’ bad behavior and Stanford Prison Experiment
Slate.com: Situationist Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment doesn’t explain Abu Ghraib, by William Saletan
IMDb: Untitled Stanford Prison Experiment Project
VIDEO: Talk to MIT re: new book: The Lucifer Effect
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment”
Categories: 1971 in the United States | Imprisonment and detention | Social psychology | Group processes | Psychology experiments | Stanford University | Human experimentation in the United States | Academic scandals | 1970s in science | Research ethics

Mohammed Hussain, Patricia Hussain, Des Plaines IL.

Fight for Freedom — Aaron Diamant Story Created: Sep 27, 2007 Story Updated: Oct 1, 2007

Imagine waking up one morning to FBI agents, guns drawn, breaking down your door. In front of your terrified family, they tackle you, and haul you off to jail. Three years later, you don’t face any criminal charges, but you’re still locked up.

“It’s been a total disaster,” said Patricia Hussain of Des Plaines, Illinois.

Her husband, Mohammad, has spent the last three years behind bars in a Wisconsin jail. Still, Patricia Hussain puts on a good face for her daughter.

“It’s overwhelming. Very overwhelming and very sad,” Hussain sighed.

In 2004, Hussain says her daughter watched in horror as the FBI took her father away in handcuffs. She only sees him a couple times a month during short visits to the Dodge County Jail, which houses federal detainees.

“She’s really traumatized by this whole experience,” Hussain told the I-Team. “I mean she cries every time she sees him.”

The Feds charged Mohammad Hussain with not telling anyone he was a member of a political party in Pakistan when he applied for American citizenship, and lying about being a citizen on a mortgage application. Two documents, Hussain’s lawyers say, someone else filled out for him. Still, Hussain got convicted.

“It does kind of boggle the mind to think that somebody can be in custody for three years for checking the wrong box,” said Geoff Heeren of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.

Even more mind-boggling, last year, a judge threw out the criminal conviction. Hussain should have gotten out then, but the government filed immigration charges which kept him locked up.

“At every step of the way, everytime we think that we’ve succeeded in getting Mohammad Hussain out of prison, something else has happened,” Heeren said. “The government has done something else to keep him there.”

Eventually, another judge ruled Hussain could get out on bond. The department of homeland security blocked it– calling him a security risk.

“They’re just crucifying him because of his race, his ethnic background and his religion,” fumed Patrica Hussain.

Mohammad Hussain left Pakistan for the United States in 1994. He got married a year later. He and his wife own a home in Des Plaines, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hussain has a Green Card and had never been in trouble with the law.

In an ironic twist, back in 2003, less than a year before the Feds picked him up, they City of Des Plaines gave Hussain a citizenship award for breaking up a store robbery and saving a clerk’s life.

Now, after three years in jail, Hussain’s health is failing. He’s losing his teeth and his hair.

The I-Team interviewed Mohammad Hussain about his ordeal on the phone from jail.

“I’ve been in constant pain,” lamented Hussain. “I mean i felt intimidated, humiliated and disrespected.”

He says he can’t understand why the government is treating him as a terrorist.

“They don’t have any proof,” Hussain argued. “They don’t have any evidence against me. I mean they are just speculating. They are just assuming in their mind that i’m a terrorist. And how to counter that? I don’t know.”

Neither does his family who just wants him to come home.

“They have literally raped us of our livelihood,” said Patricia Hussain. “They have raped us of our own happiness, our own innocence. As a U.S.-born, I never thought this would happen to my family.”

Hussain’s lawyers say keeping their client locked up is unconstitutional. A Federal Appeals Court is set to hear the case in November. We’ll keep you posted.

L.A. detainees sue immigration authorities over holding conditions

The lawsuit claims that their rights are being violated by being held for too long in a short-term facility, denied access to counsel and subjected to ‘disgusting’ conditions.
By Anna Gorman
April 3, 2009
Federal authorities are violating immigrant detainees’ constitutional rights by holding them for weeks at a detention facility in downtown Los Angeles that was designed as a short-term processing center, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

The center is “regularly overcrowded, causing violence, safety hazards and humiliation,” while detainees are denied access to attorneys and courts and are rarely provided drinking water or a change of clothing, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Immigration Law Center and the Paul Hastings law firm.

Detainees are held at the facility during the day and then shuttled to local jails at night and on weekends, which the suit said “effectively cuts detainees off from contact with the outside world” and deprives them of basic needs.

“They are detaining people in inhumane conditions, grossly unsanitary and disgusting conditions,” said Marisol Orihuela, a staff attorney at the ACLU. “There are serious violations of due process.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities said they couldn’t comment on pending litigation but issued a written statement saying that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called for a comprehensive review of the nation’s immigration practices and is committed to making “measurable, sustainable progress.”

The department is “committed to providing secure, safe and humane treatment for all of our detainees,” the statement said. “We are continuing to work with other agencies and stakeholders to improve services to those in our custody.”

During a tour of the processing center last year, Eric Saldana, Los Angeles assistant field director, said the agency does its best to keep detainees there for just 12 hours at a time and quickly moves them to facilities designed for longer holding periods. Sometimes, however, he said detainees are kept longer or brought back for several days because of delays in accessing travel documents for deportation or limited space at local jails.

“Our goal is to get people out of here as quickly as possible,” Saldana said.

The processing center holds up to 250. There are six large holding cells surrounding a central area with desks, where the detainees are photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed. Each has a phone, a bathroom and a bench around the edge. There are also smaller cells for families or juveniles. Saldana said detainees have access to medical staff and can ask to see a judge.

There are four named plaintiffs, but Orihuela said the lawsuit is on behalf of hundreds of detainees.

One of the plaintiffs, Russian immigrant Alla Suvorova, 25, said that for two weeks she spent every day at the center and every night at local jails. She was not able to get physical exercise during that time and was kept in a holding room where the toilet was consistently stopped up.

“It was terrible,” Suvorova said in an interview. “They didn’t give us soap. They didn’t let me change clothes. They were transferring me from one jail to another.”

Suvorova, married to a U.S. citizen but who overstayed her visa, said she also was not told whether she was eligible for bond. Yet when she was transferred to a facility in Washington state, she was released on bond at her first hearing. She is still fighting her case.

Another plaintiff, Mexican immigrant Abelardo Chavez Flores, 52, spent about a month and a half at the center, being taken to local jails most nights but also sleeping on the floor on several occasions. According to the lawsuit, he was held for 18 hours at a time in dirty and overcrowded rooms, denied access to a doctor and prevented from brushing his teeth for two weeks. He also wasn’t given an opportunity to see his legal documents or file an appeal on his immigration case.

The plaintiffs have asked the court to order immigration authorities to set a time limit on detention or comply with detention standards, and to provide hygiene items, sanitary conditions, adequate sleeping facilities and access to legal materials.

“We just want them to follow the minimum standards guaranteed by the Constitution and the statutory rights the detainees have,” Orihuela said.