February 2012
17 posts
Mentally ill immigrants trapped in US detention without attorneys
On the back of his shaved head is a scar from a traumatic brain injury that rendered him unable to read, write or even remember his birthday.
It was Canto-Ortiz’s deportation hearing, and U.S. District Immigration Judge David C. Anderson was testing his mental condition. The judge asked the 51-year-old detainee if he could explain what type of courtroom he was in.
“Too much problem in my head – I can’t say anything,” Canto-Ortiz mumbled in Spanish.
For the legal system and immigrant-rights attorneys, his case represents a frustrating problem without an easy answer: Illegal immigrants with severe mental health problems – many without criminal records – have been trapped in detention in the United States without attorneys.
“These are people that are sitting in detention for years, not understanding what is happening to them,” said Talia Inlender, an attorney with Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm representing several of the plaintiffs in a class-action suit on behalf of mentally ill detainees in California, Arizona and Washington. “They are so mentally disabled they can’t participate in their own removal proceedings.”
The government holds, on average, more than 30,000 illegal immigrants in detention on any given day. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials do not know how many are mentally disabled, but class-action attorneys estimate as many as 1,000 immigration detainees have a “serious mental illness.”
In January 2011, Inlender and a group of pro bono law firms identified Canto-Ortiz, a native of Mexico who came to the U.S. as a child, as a potential plaintiff in the lawsuit they filed last year. It is the first class-action suit on behalf of detainees with severe mental disabilities who go through the immigration courts without access to attorneys.
The class-action lawsuit contends that by denying severely mentally ill detainees the right to court-appointed attorneys, the federal government has stripped them of due process rights and violated federal anti-discrimination laws. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives non-citizens the privilege of representation, but not at the government’s expense. Read the full story.
Photo by Ken Steinhardt:
Maria Franco embraces son Jose Franco-Gonzalez as his father, Francisco Franco, watches after Franco-Gonzalez’s release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in March 2010. Franco-Gonzalez, who is mentally disabled, pleaded guilty to assault in 2005 and was detained for five years without a hearing.
“Nobody is telling male reporters to stay home despite the fact that they have been beaten, kidnapped, and killed globally.”
—Lauren Wolfe, journalist and director of Women Under Siege, in an interview with Torie Rose DeGhett. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for laws of this sort.”
—Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion declaring that California’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. More in the San Francisco Chronicle. (via californiawatch)
California Watch: SF official wants to restrict police role in terrorism probes →
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A San Francisco politician wants tougher oversight of local police and the role they play in terrorism investigations following complaints from residents that they were unnecessarily targeted for questioning and surveillance by Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
Dozens of new task forces led by…
January 2012
21 posts
“I believe that this could be catastrophic in terms of HIV prevention.”
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Michael Weinstein, president the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Weinstein was commenting on drugmaker Gilead’s application for FDA approval to market its HIV treatment medication Truvada as a HIV prevention pill. If Truvada is approved for preventive use, it “would be the first agent indicated for uninfected individuals to reduce the risk of acquiring HIV through sex,” according to a company statement at the time of the filing last month.
Gilead’s application, however, has sparked debate among public health advocates who argue that the wide availability of the drug would discourage safe sex and would, in fact, increase the incidence of HIV.
The Lens & University of Oxford to launch #trailertrack search through the Southeast this weekend →
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Our investigation found that the trailers, many of which were proven to be releasing toxic levels of formaldehyde from the particle board walls into the small living space, were being released into the open market with little to no assurance that buyers would be made aware of the possible dangers of long-term exposure to the interior to the trailers — and that the people most likely to buy these units are low-income folks in need of cheap housing in the wake of massive disaster or a housing crisis.
Despite our investigation and frequent indications that people living in the units frequently suffer from respiratory illness and skin problems, we haven’t seen any significant steps toward protecting buyers from potentially harmful housing. In fact, we’ve found that FEMA sold or auctioned these trailers into the open market, and the units are now being used as long-term housing as natural disasters destroy homes and a housing crisis forces some people to downgrade to more affordable lodging.
Most importantly, the tests we’ve run on some of these trailers have shown extremely high levels of formaldehyde, which indicates that dangerous concentrations of the neurotoxin may be present in as many as 50,000 trailers . There has been no effort to track the location of these trailers beyond their initial sale, allowing the potentially toxic units to be easily bought and sold across the country despite the health risks.
For these reasons, The Lens is teaming up with the University of Oxford for Trailertrack, a journalistic and scientific excursion to the southeast United States. Ariella Cohen, an investigative reporter with The Lens, and Nick Shapiro, a medical anthropologist with the University of Oxford, will leave today for Florida to seek out trailers and trailer residents, test the trailers they find for formaldehyde, and learn more about how the units are turning up many miles from New Orleans. The trailertrackers will hit Ocala, Harvey, Tampa and Palm Beach this weekend, and will also visit Texas and Oklahoma in the coming weeks. You can view a map and itinerary here.
We’ll be posting here regularly to keep you informed on the status of the trackers. You can also follow Ariella on Twitter at @cohenlensnola, where she’ll be updating followers on the duo’s progress with the hashtag #trailertrack.
If you have any knowledge about FEMA trailers being sold or lived in near your community, please click here and let us know.
