Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese computer engineer living in New York since 1992, had an American wife and two U.S.-born sons. He lived the American dream, was a positive member of the community and contributed to the economy. But apparently he was a threat to homeland security, and now he's dead.
When Ng came to the U.S. with his parents and siblings in 1992 on a tourist visa, he stayed after it expired and applied for political asylum. He was granted a work permit while his application was pending, and though asylum was eventually denied, immigration authorities elected not to seek his deportation.
But when Mr. Ng went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.
In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.
According to this New York Times article, Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.
Is this how we would want foreign countries to treat Americans undergoing immigration problems in other countries? It is sickening to me that Bush's obsession with border control and disdain for immigrants would lead to a situation like this. What happened to "compassionate conservatism"? How can Bush lecture China about human rights when this is going on in the U.S.?
No comments:
Post a Comment