Immigrants have died while in U.S. custody, some because jailers denied them medical treatment.
Even hardliners who wish to round up all 12 million illegal immigrants and ship them back from where they came wouldn't, we hope, want to kill any in the process.
Yet immigrants have died in administrative custody because their jailers failed to provide medication or doctors. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently disclosed 62 people have died in the past three years, far more than the 20 previously known deaths.
While ICE hasn't released information about the deaths, The New York Times learned the circumstances of three of the people -- two of whom perished in Virginia prisons.
Neither Sandra M. Kenley nor Abdolai Sall represent the stereotypes that spring to mind when people talk about illegals. Kenley, a legal permanent resident for 30 years, was detained after returning to the U.S. from a visit to Barbados on two old drug-related convictions that made her subject to exclusion. Sall was arrested during an immigration interview because of an old paperwork snafu.
Both told authorities they had serious health problems and pleaded for their medication.
Deaths from medical neglect aren't supposed to occur in U.S. prisons.
In fact, ICE detention standards state that detainees will undergo a medical exam soon after arrest. Only no one checks to see if the mosaic of public and private jails, prisons and detention centers follow the suggested guidelines.
The Senate, faced with mounting reports of deaths and abuses of detainees, unanimously agreed to amend the current immigration bill and establish an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security.
Now even that paltry gesture is as dead as the immigration bill and as dead as Kenley and Sall.
This country, under President Bush, has ceded its long-held moral high ground on human rights, a trade-off the administration was willing to accept in its ill-fought "war on terror."
Once one category of people is considered unworthy of humane treatment, it becomes easier to devalue the next group and ignore Sandra Kenley's pleas for her blood pressure medication. She was, after all, an immigrant, even if a legal one.
Who's next?
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