Education Freestyle

Source: New York Times

For lawyers offering free legal information at large immigration detention centers in remote parts of Texas, there is also the challenge of discovering that many of the detainees are either too mentally ill or mentally disabled to understand anything.

The detainees, mostly apprehended in New York and other Northeastern cities, some right from mental hospitals, have often been moved to Texas without medication or medical records, far from relatives and mental health workers who know their history. Their mental incompetence is routinely ignored by immigration judges and deportation officers, who are under growing pressure to handle rising caseloads and meet quotas set by the government.

These are among the findings of a yearlong examination of the way the nation’s immigration detention system handles the mentally disabled in Texas, where 29 percent of all detainees are held while the government tries to deport them. The study, conducted by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center, and Akin Gump, a corporate law firm that provided 38 lawyers for the study, documents mistreatment at every stage of the process.

Among many examples in the 88-page report, to be released Tuesday, is a 50-year-old legal permanent resident with schizophrenia who had lived in New York City since 1974. In November, a New York criminal court declared him incompetent to stand trial on a trespassing charge and ordered him to serve 90 days in a mental institution. Instead, he was transferred to the Willacy County Regional Detention Facility in Texas, to face a deportation proceeding without counsel — so abruptly, the report said, that his family and lawyer did not know what had happened to him.

At Willacy, he received no medication for weeks, and in March, he was deported to the Dominican Republic. “My mother is devastated,” his sister, Janet Jiminez, said on Sunday. “She says he will die out there on the streets.”

“I’ve been a U.S. citizen for many, many years,” Ms. Jiminez added. “I’m law abiding, I pay taxes. If we have a law system and the law system has declared that you are incompetent and should be taken to a mental hospital, why are you taken to Texas to be deported?”

Physician diagnostics are supposed to be upheld in court, but many of the deportees are said to never get close enough to a doctor to have their physical and mental state analyzed. Instead, they are letting intrusion prevention tactics and immigration quotas guide their instincts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report said, is routinely ignoring its discretionary authority to leave such mentally ill detainees in appropriate community settings rather than lock them up, at great expense, in distant jails where they can rapidly deteriorate.

The agency is reviewing the report, Brian P. Hale, a spokesman, said Monday, adding that “in cases where I.C.E. is required by law to detain certain aliens with serious medical and mental health issues, we work to ensure the person receives sound, appropriate, and timely care.” An evaluation of such cases is under way, he said.

A recent government memo shows that agents are under intense pressure to detain and deport as many people as possible. James M. Chaparro, the Obama administration’s chief of detention and removal operations, congratulated agents in the memo for reaching the agency’s goal of “150,000 criminal alien removals” for the year ending Sept. 30. But urged them to overcome a shortfall in the goal of 400,000 total deportations by making maximum use of detention, including an extra 3,000 slots added this year.

Despite the administration’s vow to focus resources on detaining and deporting the most dangerous criminals, the Feb. 22 memo, posted online by The Washington Post on Saturday, instructed agents to pick up the pace of deportations by detaining more noncitizens suspected only of unauthorized residence. Such illegal immigrants can typically be deported more quickly than legal immigrants with criminal convictions.

The publication of the memo clearly embarrassed the administration. A spokesman, Sean Smith, said that “our focus continues to be on the criminal side,” and that Mr. Chaparro was to be publicly reprimanded on Monday by John Morton, the chief of the immigration enforcement agency, at a meeting with immigrant advocacy groups. The memo, Mr. Smith added, was sent without Mr. Morton’s approval and “is completely unrelated” to the findings of the Texas study.

But Ann Baddour, who directed the study, disagreed. “Setting these kinds of quotas only encourages the process of detaining people and taking them far from their infrastructure,” she said. “When you take a mentally ill person from New York to rural Texas, you’re basically setting them up for almost certain deportation.”

Noting that the memo shows that agents are being rated on the speed of their deportations, she added, “It doesn’t prioritize justice, it doesn’t prioritize humane treatment.”

Other examples in the report include a Haitian man found incompetent to stand trial in an assault case and ordered to undergo six months of treatment at a state mental hospital in Boston. The day he arrived at the hospital, however, immigration agents sent him in shackles and without medical records to the Port Isabel Detention Center near Los Fresnos, Tex.

In that case, the man was eventually returned to the Boston hospital, said Maunica Sthanki, a lawyer who was involved in the study. More typical, she said, is the mentally disabled refugee from Southeast Asia who was wrongly taken into custody in Providence, R.I., sent to Texas, then abruptly released without notice at a rural gas station at 11 p.m.

The report details several such releases: a schizophrenic woman who spoke only Russian, left in a dangerous area at 1 a.m.; a man lost for a week on his way back from Texas to his family in Maryland; a delusional man who was deported four days earlier than planned, though his parents had arranged for his voluntary departure to Mexico, where his mother was to pick him up.

Two years later, the man has not been found, but a body matching his description is in a morgue in Mexico.

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My Take: It should not matter whether a detainee is a legal citizen of this country or a distant cousin of an Austin divorce lawyer who happens to be schizophrenic and living on the streets. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, whether their custom birth announcements were forged so they can come here for a better life, or they manage to fly beneath the radar and work for an iPhone repair company. They deserve to be fully and fairly examined for mental illnesses before they are sent off to some netherworld where they are more likely only going to get sicker, if not worse.

Every lawyer in the country, even a mediocre divorce attorney in Austin TX, should be jumping on the opportunity to find out what’s happening to these people in Texas and why. You would think that with all the technology our government has in place with respect to network security software that it could do a better job of tracking the status of the people they incarcerate on immigration violation charges. We live in a time when construction cost estimating software is being used to design the most intricate buildings ever; it takes a moment to fix GPS glitches, or conduct an in-office smoke check to see if patients are at risk of disease. Why can’t we take better care of people, regardless of where they come from?

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