How Many Deaths Too Many, in Expanding Immigration Detention?

America's Voice Blog

Posted 01/28/09 at 11:31pm

Prison graphic New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein calls attention to another unnecessary deaths of an immigrant detainees in Virginia detention facilities in today's piece, "Another Prison Death, and Mounting Questions."

She writes:

He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words "Raised American" tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.

His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell.

Bernstein continues by linking Guido's death to other cases of malpractice within the burgeoning detention industry:

Accounts of Mr. Newbrough's last days echo other cases of deaths in immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so lacking that they concluded, "Detainee health care is in jeopardy."

The plot thickens when we take into account that, according to the Detention Watch Network, "The U.S. government detains over 310,000 people a year - more than triple the number of people in detention just ten years ago - in a hodgepodge of approximately 400 facilities at an annual cost of more than $1.7 billion." Their website warns:

The system is set to triple again even without new legislation. Already 6,300 additional beds have been added in 2007 and 4,150 in 2008. With ICE's 2009 budget approved, the number of beds will reach a record-high of 33,400.

Stories of deaths like Mr. Newbrough's are becoming surprisingly commonplace- report after report show that health conditions are unacceptable within the country's fastest-growing prison industry, immigration detention. This kind of outright neglect should send a chill up the spines of those whose job it will now be to oversee our nation's tangled immigration system.

By Jackie Mahendra
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