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May 7, 2008
 Better Health Care Sought for Detained Immigrants By NINA
BERNSTEIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/nina_bernstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
JULIA
PRESTON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/julia_preston/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of
inadequate medical care in
immigration<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>detention
announced on Tuesday that she had introduced legislation to set
mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to
the Justice Department and Congress.

"This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration," the
chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill,
which she introduced late last week. "This is about whether the government
is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of
civilization."

The need for the bill, she said, was underscored by an article in The New
York Times on Monday about the 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old
tailor from Guinea. His name was one of 66 on a government list of detention
deaths obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement by The Times under
the Freedom of Information Act.

Records show that Mr. Bah, who suffered a skull fracture and multiple brain
hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, was left in an
isolation cell there without treatment for more than 14 hours.

Ms. Lofgren's legislation would require the federal government to establish
mandatory standards for medical and mental health care, replacing the
voluntary standards that apply now in the network of more than 300 publicly
and privately run jails where the government holds people while it decides
whether to deport them.

The bill would also require the secretary of the Homeland Security
Department<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/homeland_security_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org>to
report all deaths in immigration detention within 48 hours to the
Justice
Department's inspector general as well as its own. Immigration officials
would be required to submit a detailed report on such deaths to Congress
every year.

"We are not talking about Cadillac health care here," Ms. Lofgren said, "but
the government is obligated to provide basic care. Many of those in
immigration custody are there for minor violations, many for administrative
and paperwork-related mistakes. Their detention should not be a death
sentence."

Officials of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said they would not
comment on Ms. Lofgren's proposal because they did not discuss pending
legislation.

But officials said that while the number of immigrants detained had
increased by 34 percent from 2004 through last year, the numbers of deaths
in its detention centers had declined each year.

"While a single death of an ICE detainee is a serious matter, we strive to
maintain safe, secure and human detention conditions and to ensure that all
detainees receive quality health care," said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman
for the agency.

According to figures the agency provided on Tuesday, from January 2004 until
last Friday it recorded 71 deaths of immigrants in its custody, including 5
since the list was released to The Times, 4 of them this year. Ms. Nantel
did not provide details of those cases.

In the 2004 fiscal year, according to the figures, the agency detained
231,804 immigrants, and about one out of every 9,200 died. In fiscal 2007,
when the agency detained a total of 311,213 immigrants, roughly one out of
every 28,000 died. Immigration officials said the agency spent $91.6 million
last year on health care for its detention centers, an 82 percent increase
since 2004.

Ms. Lofgren said the agency's count of deaths could understate the problem,
because detainees who were denied critical treatment could die after they
were released or deported.

She cited the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the
hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his
penis for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant,
despite his pleas and doctors' recommendations. By the time he received the
treatment he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have
metastasized penile cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.

He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and
died on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in
a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical
negligence in the case last month.

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