Documents Reveal Earlier Immigrant Deaths

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 9, 2010

Over the last two years, the news media and Congress have brought attention to many deaths in the immigration detention system that appear to have involved substandard medical care or abuse. But a trove of documents obtained over recent months by The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union sheds light on even more fatalities.

Among the most haunting cases to emerge from the files are deaths that were undisclosed at the time but foreshadow the later fatalities that galvanized public attention.

One example is the case of Miguel J. Rodriguez Gonzales, 43, a longtime legal resident of California who was detained for immigration violations on Feb. 22, 2006. He had end-stage renal disease, diabetes and chronic heart failure, and was receiving dialysis at a hospital three times a week.

Records show that Mr. Rodriguez fell at least five times during his first 10 days in detention and reported “intense pain all over.” By March he was unable to shower by himself, and “for hygiene issues” he was sent to a disciplinary isolation cell. Soon he had to be taken to the clinic in a wheelchair because he was unable to walk.

“He has been sent to the emergency room three times and has been admitted twice for infection and hypotensive episodes while in our custody,” an immigration enforcement officer reported to a supervisor in April 2006, noting that the man’s condition appeared to be rapidly deteriorating.

To give him a chance to find a lawyer, the report said, an immigration judge kept delaying his deportation to Mexico — where Mr. Rodriguez had told jail medical personnel that he had no family and could not get dialysis.

On April 10, 2006, after two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents returned him to the San Pedro detention center after dialysis, Mr. Rodriguez told a supervisor that the agents had made him stand up from the wheelchair and let him fall to the ground several times, laughing and insisting that he could walk.

“He asked why they were treating him that way,” the supervisor wrote in a report about the allegations. “They picked him up from the ground and harshly shoved him into the transporting vehicle. One used his feet to shove or kick him into the vehicle.”

The Rodriguez matter was referred to the agency’s Office of the Inspector General, records show. But when an investigator arrived to interview Mr. Rodriguez, he was in a coma. With no complaining witness, the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the local United States attorney’s office declined to prosecute without comment. And when Mr. Rodriguez died on April 21, 2006, the investigation was closed.

The allegations are strikingly similar to those made by the family of Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese computer engineer who died in April 2008, his spine broken and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed in a Rhode Island detention center, where he had pleaded in vain for proper medical care. In that case, however, the investigation unfolded against a backdrop of news media coverage and a lawsuit by relatives.

Detention center guards had been caught on security cameras as they dragged Mr. Ng from his cell a week before his death, insisted that he could walk, and ridiculed him as they loaded him into a van. The agency, caught in the spotlight of public attention, stopped placing immigration detainees there.

“There are tremendous acts of cruelty, and these are not just rogue individuals,” said Joshua Bardavid, a lawyer who represented Mr. Ng. “If there’s a common thread, it’s the system. It really is a systemic problem.”

Last summer the Obama administration announced an overhaul of detention, including improved health care for detainees and more centralized oversight. But the administration did not make legally binding rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates. It argued that “rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible” than its own overhaul.

“I’m glad there are changes in the works, but obviously it’s too late for a lot of people,” Mr. Bardavid said. “And I’m skeptical until I see actually substantive changes and independently enforceable rules.”

Tomas Esparza Abogado “Conozco Sus Derechos”

Family claims U.S. midwife policies disrupted lives

January 03, 2010 10:20 PM

Jazmine Ulloa

The Brownsville Herald

BROWNSVILLE — The midwife home in Brownsville where Trinidad Muraira de Castro says she gave birth to her second daughter more than 25 years ago still stands on East Jackson Street. But, the midwife who delivered Yuliana no longer lives in it. Times have changed.

One August morning last year, Trinidad attempted to cross from Matamoros through a Brownsville port of entry with her two daughters, now in their twenties, and a newborn granddaughter, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Brownsville in September. But Yuliana’s birth certificate, registered by midwife Trinidad Saldivar, came into question.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer suspected the document to be false and for the next 11 hours, he held the women at the port of entry for intense interrogation, the Castros state in court records. The women say the officer harassed and threatened them with deportation or imprisonment to persuade them to sign papers confessing that their documents were fraudulent. They say they were not allowed to call anyone for help or speak to relatives who came to look for them.

“After a while, I realized I had no way out since he (the CBP officer) told me no matter what I did, to him, I was Mexican,” Yuliana, 25, writes in her statement.

Immigration attorneys are now seeking class-action status for the women’s lawsuit against CBP, saying the problem underwent by the Castros is systematic and a “window into the cases of dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly situated persons.”

CBP officers in the past have been accused of mistakenly detaining, deporting or denying entry to dozens of lawful U.S. citizens under what many have called a complicated and broken U.S. immigration system. But since the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative went into effect in June, those primarily targeted for long interrogations at ports of entry have been people with birth certificates issued by midwives, immigration attorneys said.

The travel security measure requires all U.S. citizens to present passport books, passport cards or other initiative-compliant documents when crossing into the country from Mexico through land borders.

A judge has since granted the sisters permission to re-enter the United States, but they can no longer visit their mother in Matamoros.

Their case demonstrates, immigration attorneys said, how the U.S.-Mexico border has become a different place for families like Trinidad’s, people who for years have made their lives along both sides of the Rio Grande.

Class-action status sought against CBP in midwife lawsuit

January 03, 2010 10:18 PM
Jazmine Ulloa
The Brownsville Herald

BROWNSVILLE — Immigration attorneys are seeking class-action status for a lawsuit against U.S. Customs and Border Protection that could have widespread implications along the U.S.-Mexico border. The issue involves U.S. citizens who say they were held for long hours at ports of entry in South Texas and denied entry into the country after they presented birth certificates registered by midwives.

CBP officials are apparently referring U.S. citizens to further inspection if their documents show their births were attended by midwives in the United States, court records in the lawsuit state. Officers are accused of interrogating people for hours, on suspicion of holding fraudulent documents, and of threatening them to sign “confessions,” which say they were falsely registered as born in Texas, according to court filings.

Once those detained are declared inadmissible into the country, CBP officials confiscate all of their documents and return them to Mexico, immigration attorneys said.

“Most people are totally unaware of this risk, which is why they fall into this trap,” said Elisabeth Lisa Brodyaga, one of the lead attorneys in the case that was filed in September in a Brownsville federal court. “We still do not know how often it is happening. The problem is that when it happens to someone they end up in Mexico, cut off from access to counsel.”

CBP officials are not at liberty to discuss any cases under litigation, CBP spokesman Eddie Perez said. But in general, the process at the port of entry can be cumbersome for officials, he said.

“We try to cover every base. We want to make sure every person we process is clear to enter,” Perez said. “Sometimes that process is long; sometimes it is short.”

The lawsuit follows a series of complications for people delivered by midwives in the Rio Grande Valley and along the Texas-Mexico border, the most recent of which came to light with the implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, now in effect since June.

The travel security measure requires all U.S. citizens to present passport books, passport cards or other initiative-compliant documents when crossing into the country from Mexico by land.

But for years the U.S. Department of State had been arbitrarily rejecting hundreds of passport applications from people whose births were attended by midwives, citing a history of forgeries for Mexican-born children in South Texas dating back to the 1960s, immigration attorneys said.

Immigration attorneys say they saw a steady stream of cases in which the department sent applicants in bureaucratic circles, asking them to provide all sorts of additional proof of their citizenship — from birth announcements to high school yearbook pictures. The problem finally incited a class-action lawsuit filed against the Department of State by the American Civil Liberties Union and immigration attorneys representing citizens denied passports.

In a settlement agreement last year, the department agreed to instate new procedures and training for officers taking passport submissions. But while the settlement won victories for some applicants, many people’s passport requests remain in limbo, said immigration attorney Jaime Díez, who is working on the case with Brodyaga.

And now the contest over U.S. citizenship for those still waiting for passports is playing out at international bridges. For many born with the assistance of midwives, the same issues that have held back their applications with the Department of State are causing CBP officers to suspect they hold fraudulent documents, immigration attorneys said.

“But these are issues that should be handled in a courtroom, not the port of entry, where people do not have access to counsel nor their constitutional rights,” Díez said.

At international bridges, people apply for entry into the United States and are not considered U.S. citizens. Thus, people do not have constitutional rights and are more vulnerable, attorneys said.

Some who are still waiting for their passports and may face interrogation at ports of entry are those whose applications were denied outright by the Department of State because a convicted midwife issued their birth certificate. Since 1960, 75 Texas midwives have been convicted of falsely registering Mexican-born babies as U.S. citizens.

Most of the women made declarations in court admitting they had committed fraud, but most of their clients were not notified of their statements in the past and are just now battling the allegations in court, Díez said.

“The problem is determining which birth certificates are false and which are not,” he said. “(Immigration officials) should not assume that every child these women delivered was born in Mexico.”

Others whose applications remain in question are U.S. citizens, mostly seniors, who have delayed birth certificates, or documents registered a few days after their births as was customary in the past. And those who might have the highest risk to confront obstacles at international bridges are U.S. citizens who were also registered for Mexican birth certificates by their parents, a common practice along the border for years, especially among families who wished to raise their children in Mexico.

Trinidad Muraira de Castro, a litigant in the lawsuit against CBP, obtained such falsified Mexican birth certificates for her daughters, Laura Nancy and Yuliana Trinidad de Castro, seeking to enroll them in a Matamoros school, Brodyaga said. In statements, she and her daughters describe how CBP officers kept them for about 11 hours at the Brownsville and Matamoros International Bridge after Yuliana presented a birth certificate issued by a midwife and her passport application receipt — documents that fall under WHTI requirements and should enable her to cross.

They were taken into rooms for individual questioning and harassed, the women write in their statements. Out of fear, Trinidad signed a false confession stating that her daughters were born in Matamoros, she wrote.

“The instant case is not an isolated instance, but a window into the cases of dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly situated persons,” immigration attorneys contend in court documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union has not yet become involved with this case. For now, however, attorneys are advising passport applicants who have unsolved issues with the Department of State and have not received their documents to refrain from crossing.

“This issue is tearing families apart,” Díez said. “Unfortunately, I feel we are only seeing the beginnings of this problem.”