For immigrants, illness can bring a death sentence

By Laura Rótolo November 5, 2009

THE RECENT DEATH of an immigrant who was detained at the Suffolk County House of Correction is a tragic display of the human rights crisis in the Massachusetts detention system for immigrants facing deportation.

The death of Pedro Juan Tavarez, as well as the 2006 death of Vincent Murphy, another Suffolk detainee, brings to at least 105 the number of known deaths of immigrants in custody of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2003. While the details behind these two deaths remain murky, we must ask whether they, like others around the country, were caused by the failure to provide the most basic health care to people detained in Massachusetts jails and prisons during deportation proceedings.

While outside the prison gates the nation debates whether to overhaul the health care system with a public option, detained immigrants have no option at all. They cannot bring their own doctors to jail or get their own medication, even if they are willing to pay for them. If immigrants become sick in detention, they must rely on a system that has failed time and again to respond to even the most urgent medical needs.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts makes money on locking up immigrants. The Suffolk County jail, which can hold approximately 275 immigration detainees on any given day, receives $90 per detainee per day from the federal government. One alternative to detention - a GPS monitoring ankle device - costs about $12 a day.

As the lead investigator of a recent 18-month ACLU study of detention conditions in Massachusetts, I saw firsthand the systemic denial of medical care at the nine immigration detention sites - and the fear of retaliation for speaking up about problems.

I repeatedly requested and was denied access to reports filed with the government by lawyers from American Bar Association, who had permission to visit detainees at Suffolk and other county jails in Massachusetts. For years, the Bush administration kept these ABA reports a secret. Recently, however, the Obama administration made them public, and the ABA’s findings directly confirm that detained immigrants are often ignored or face excessively long waits to be seen by a doctor. Some reported that they waited months to be seen by medical personnel, while often growing sicker.

I was surprised to learn that detainees had written a letter to the Bar Association on the day Vincent Murphy died, alleging that he had died from a lack of medical care. They said he was “was coughing blood when he arrived, and detainees notified facility staff of his illness, but staff was ‘not willing to listen.’ ’’

Both the American Bar Association and the ACLU found that detainees fear retaliation if they dare to speak up at Suffolk County jail. Such fear is “at a level that the ABA has not encountered in the nearly five years that we have been visiting detention facilities.’’ ABA lawyers reported such difficulty finding detainees who would speak with them about conditions at Suffolk that they ended up talking to only two detainees, both of whom were so agitated and emotional with fear during their interviews that one of them “held his hands together to try to control his shaking.’’

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced plans to improve the immigration detention system. The deaths of two immigrants in Boston serve as a tragic reminder that the need for change is urgent and that the stakes are literally a matter of life and death.

Laura Rótolo is a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and author of the recent ACLU report “Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE.’’