Every once in a while, the New York Times produces a story so chilling that you not only read it to the end – you read it twice or three times. Nina Bernstein should get a prize for her lead story Sunday about U.S. treatment of the men and women who die in U.S. immigration jails.
More than 100 people have died in U.S. custody in the jails since 2003. And the Times reports that U.S. immigration officials covered up information about the mistreatment and deaths. In one shocking instance, former Vermont reporter and gubernatorial aide Michael Gilhooly, now a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, rebuffed a reporter asking about a detainee with a fractured skull. Gilhooly told the reporter he could not answer her questions. But the Times reports that he had already told superiors about the inquiry and shared information of the detainee, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. The Times reports that Bah had been left in an isolation cell for 13 hours before an ambulance was called.
The Times reports that agency officials in Washington and Newark, N.J. conferred by telephone and email about avoiding the cost of Bah’s care and also the bad publicity.
Bah died.
What a mess from top to bottom. You can bet there are lots of meetings happening right now in the Obama administration about how this was handled from a communications standpoint.
What should they do? Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano should immediately order an investigation and an overhaul of the immigration detainment policy and bring in an independent, respected authority to oversee the changes. Then once she has discovered what happened and why, she should repeat over and over again the changes and progress made.
