Way to go you idiot bastards:
Man whose US immigration notice was sent to the wrong address is detained with untreated spinal cancer until he dies, denied access to his wife and children: “A Hong Kong computer programmer who had legally resided in the US for 15 years (since he was 17) and fathered two American children went for his final green card interview and was locked up, detained until he died of cancer that the DHS refused to treat him for. He had overstayed a visa (the DHS sent a key notice to the wrong address), and this prompted the DHS to lock him away and demand that he waive all right to immigration appeal and be immediately deported. In detention, his complaints of excruciating back pain were treated as fakery, and he was dragged around in shackles after he lost the ability to walk, taken on long, bumpy drives while official demanded that he drop his immigration appeals. The jailers who caused his death were private contractors with fat deals with the DHS to lock up immigration detainees.
As he lay dying, his family — wife and two children, aged 1 and 3 — were denied access to him while the warden considered their request to visit.
‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses…’
(Via Boing Boing.)
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August 15th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Your link in the “Via” line to Boing Boing has a trailing slash after .html and fails.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I showed the NYT source article to a good friend of mine. His response? “We screw up, no doubt. It isn’t policy, however, to ruin or violate someone’s life.”
Just goes to show why things like this happen… apathy. That and if you aren’t born in the US you’re somehow less human.
The same person will get violently animated when discussing the horrors our soldiers who are taken as prisoners undergo.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Thanks cybermage, link corrected.
Part of it is the stress that officers have to endure. When people come in to this country, they are judge, jury and executioner of the decision that affects an entire life… and that decision must be made in seconds.
Regardless, some stories of officers who abuse this power come out – and those are the ones that really make me sad.