Immigration Agency’s Revised List of Deaths in Custody

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: nyt

The document that follows, “List of Detainee Deaths since October 2003,” is the government’s latest account of deaths in immigration detention, through Feb. 7, 2009. Compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, it lists the names of 90 people who died, their dates of birth and death, their nationality, where they died or were last held, whether an autopsy report or death certificate was secured, and the cause of death.

The chart updates the first government list of 66 names, also attached, which covered a period between Jan. 1, 2004, and November 2007. The new chart adds deaths that occurred before and since, and corrects some omissions.

Notably, it adds the Sept. 9, 2005, death of Tanveer Ahmad, also known as Ahmad Tanveer, 43, of Pakistan. Officials had maintained for months that no records of his death could be found, despite complaints that he had died after his severe and obvious symptoms of a heart attack went untreated for hours at the Monmouth County Correctional Institute, in Freehold, N.J.

New errors appear on the latest list, and it omits at least one known death from 2008: that of Ana Romero Rivera, 44, of El Salvador, found hanged in a cell at the Franklin County Jail in Frankfort, Ky., on Aug. 21. Ms. Romero, a cleaning woman, had been placed in isolation for not eating, according to local newspaper reports. Though she was being held for deportation, federal officials now disagree whether she was legally in immigration custody when she died.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/nyregion/03detainlist.html

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The difficulty of confirming the very existence of the dead man, Ahmad Tanveer, 43, a Pakistani New Yorker, shows how death can fall between the cracks in immigration detention, the rapidly growing patchwork of more than 500 county jails, profit-making prisons and federal detention centers where half a million noncitizens were held during the last year while the government tried to deport them.

The case underscores the secrecy and lack of legal accountability that continue to shield the system from independent oversight, despite years of escalating Congressional inquiries and new efforts by Obama administration appointees to promote transparency.

“We still do not know, and we cannot know, if there are other deaths that have never been disclosed by ICE, or that ICE itself knows nothing about,” said Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been battling in court for months to obtain government records on all detention deaths, including the Freehold case and those named on the first government list, obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html?em