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CHICAGO, Illinois (CMC) — Immigration advocates here say they have submitted an unusual petition to the United Nations as a last-ditch effort to win the release of an ailing Jamaican man detained in Louisiana.
The Chicago-based US National Immigrant Justice Centre (NIJC) said Owen Dale, a legal permanent resident who has been held for deportation for more than five years, is likely to die of medical neglect in the detention centre at Oakdale, Louisiana, unless the United Nations intervenes soon.
The NIJC said that as Dale's court appeals languish, his health has "sharply declined" from diabetes, chronic asthma, liver disease, severe arthritis and high blood pressure.
NIJC advocates said an outline of Dale's case was presented at a White House meeting in May under the heading, "The Next Death in Immigration Detention".
They said they decided to turn to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention only after "fruitless appeals" to officials at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including Phyllis Coven, the acting director of detention policy and planning, who visited Oakdale this month.
Brian Hale, an ICE spokesman, said that despite the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision, Dale was an "aggravated felon," subject to mandatory detention.
The court on Thursday overruled Dale's deportation order, finding that the Board of Immigration Appeals had "wrongly concluded" that his 2000 conviction for attempted assault made him deportable as an "aggravated felon." The court sent the case back to the board for a new decision.
But Hale said senior officials had reviewed Dale's care and were satisfied that he had "unfettered access to medical treatment".
NIJC said Dale's case, and the petition to an international body, more accustomed to appeals from places like Myanmar and China than the United States, "underscores the current frustration of immigrant advocates".
The petition contends that "medical neglect and human rights abuses remain rife in a system that continues to detain some 400,000 people a year".
Tara Tidwell Cullen, an NIJC spokeswoman, said advocates hoped that bringing international attention to the Dale case would "increase pressure on ICE to improve oversight of detention facilities, and save the lives of our client and others."
Cullen said the US government has been trying to deport Dale since 2005, based on his guilty plea to attempted aggravated assault in a 1998 shooting at a halfway house he operated in Uniondale, upstate New York.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Dale, who had no prior trouble with the law,</span> served three and a half years in prison and paid more than US$9,000 in restitution to the resident he shot with an unregistered gun during an argument in which he said he was threatened with a knife, NIJC said.
Until the shooting, Cullen said Dale's life had followed a path like that of many immigrants to New York.
According to NIJC's petition, Dale has been hospitalised five times in the past 20 months for problems including asthmatic bronchitis, acute diabetes, pancreatitis, chronic congestive heart failure, flesh-eating bacterial infection, obstructive pulmonary disease and a hernia.
Though doctors reported that he had suffered "near respiratory arrest," the petition said Dale recently endured days of gasping for breath at the Oakdale detention centre; he had a nebuliser mask pulled from his face by an infirmary assistant who accused him of "faking it" and told him to do push-ups in his cell.
Dale filed a complaint about the assistant's behaviour, but it was declared "without merit" by the same detention official who had denied all his requests for release while his appeal was pending, the petition said.
"I cannot understand why I should have been detained for five years and suffer as much as I did in a country like this, just because I exercised my rights to challenge my deportation," Dale told reporters from the detention centre, on learning about the court's recent ruling.