ICE, the new combined Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency with the silliest looking shield of any law enforcement agency ever, primarily deals with a different sort of target, aliens. Because of this, two attitudes prevail. First, they can do no wrong. Second, no matter how much wrong they do, they can just ship it out of the country and make it disappear. If ever an agency was designed to promote callousness and incompetence, ICE is it. Thus, its motto: Protecting National Security and Upholding Public Safety. How exactly does one “uphold” public safety? Read on and find out.
From the New York Times via Turley :
Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.
Ng was in the process of obtaining his green card. He was one of those aliens doing what all the chest-thumping “illegal” haters demand, following the law. What did he get for his troubles?
But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.
In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.
In 2001, Ng had missed an appointment with Immigration when his visa expired, resulting in a deportation order. But the notice of hearing was sent to a non-existent address, so Ng never knew about it. In the meantime, he had married a citizen and began the process to petition for a green card, a process that took 5 years before he was called in for his interview. It was at this interview that he was seized and imprisoned.
While his family struggled to help him in a complicated fight, since the system is ill-equipped to address its own failures under the presumption that the government is incapable of doing anything wrong, Ng stayed in prison. Things didn’t go well for him there:
[Ng] complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.
Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.
No one from ICE would provide a legitimate reason why Ng was taken to Hartford on July 30, but it is believe that the trip was intended to prove that Ng was faking his condition. He wasn’t.
On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.
At least torturing prisoners at Gitmo serves some logical, albeit disgraceful, purpose. Ng suffered torture in the hands of ICE as a product of sheer stupidity and callousness. It just didn’t seem possible to our beloved government employees that a man with a fractured spine and cancer might be in need of medical care.
And of course, there’s the grand irony that Ng’s imprisonment came as a result of Immigration’s screw-up of sending notice of hearing to a non-existent address in the first place, while he was busily filling out forms and doing everything the proper way. A lot of good that did him.
Before some badge-licker (as J-dog likes to call them) opines “stercus accidit,” consider how many people, from ICE agents to prison staff, to the judge before whom Ng’s case was brought by his desperate attorneys, had an opportunity to correct this situation during his year in ICE custody.
But hey, it’s not like he was 110% American and deserving of being treated like a human being, right?
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Respectful, professional, and sensible treatment of people is not a hallmark of ICE. Most of the time — see checkpointusa.org (and, not that there’s any lack of good subjects for posting, Scott, but this is another one) — it’s just rude and unprofessional.
This time, though, it was deadly. That, well, sucks. Bigtime.
“…the grand irony that Ng’s imprisonment came as a result of Immigration’s screw-up of sending notice of hearing to a non-existent address in the first place,…”
It’s not entirely clear that ICE screwed up on the address issue. The Times article said they did it “mistakenly.” But is it at all possible that they had been provided with the wrong address, for example a fake address provided by Ng? It just seems suspicious that this “mistake,” arguably the tipping stone of Ng’s demise, is given a whopping one sentence of coverage in the two web-page article. And it’s sufficiently ambiguous to provide bias-deniability, yet suggest that errant mailing was entirely ICE’s fault. If it was, and records supported it, I’d think a good reporter wanting to scathingly indict ICE would provide deeper background on that mistake.
Of course the rest of it, as the other commenter states, “sucks. Bigtime.”
It’s possible, though I can think of no reason why Ng would have provided a false address. On the other hand, since Ng had applied for a green card, and there was a 5 year period of delay between the deportation order and the interview, why did Immigation accept his application and process it while doing nothing about the order?
I don’t disagree that it’s possible that it wasn’t ICE’s fault, I suspect that the reporter’s short discussion is based more on the reasonableness of expectations that the government can’t manage to send something out to the correct address (hardly a stretch) than deliberate vagary. And I would still err on the side of horses rather than zebras.
“…that the government can’t manage to send something out to the correct address…”
Or at least, once the error is exposed spend a little time, say, less than a year, checking out all the other paperwork they have on the guy to see if they should really be holding him.
“I would still err on the side of horses rather than zebras.”
I try to err this way too,but am a skeptic that sees journalistic bias (or at least oversight) in nearly every article I read.
That’s a more vexing problem. I agree completely, but am stuck with the news as it comes. In every case I’ve ever done that’s been in the news, they have always made significant factual errors. Every case. And yet the alternative is to trust nothing, and hence indulge in personal speculation as to the “real truth” in every instance.
Everybody I know — everybody — who I’ve talked to about it who has been involved in or around an event that’s made the news has said that the reporting had significant factual errors; every time I’ve asked for examples, the person has been able to point out at least one.
Cynic that I am, I’m beginning to, on behalf of my journalist sister and various journalist friends, envy the physicians who get to bury their errors.