Death and Secrets: Immigration Policy under Obama Hasn't Changed Much

Felix Franklin Rodriguez

The death of Felix Franklin Rodriguez was in the news back in 2007. That same year, Senator Richard Durbin tried to pass the DREAM Act.

When Obama was elected, I was relieved. I thought, oh yes, the DREAM Act will pass, immigration will get straightened out. People won't die in detention camps anymore. I'll never be harassed at the airport again.

None of this has happened. The DREAMers are still languishing. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers are still being detained.

The airports haven't changed much. I flew to Buenos Aires a few days ago. They have a new security device that looks like an MRI that stands up. My daughter and I were told to stand in the middle while it photographed us. I've seen articles about this thing. The workers can see your naked body very very well. At first I thought that everyone was being expected to be X-Rayed. But then I saw a few middled aged white guys coming through the other "free" lane...

When I came out of the machine the worker asked me to stretch out my arms.... of course she didn't find anything sinister.

Maybe I was delusional thinking the Obama Administration could really do something. But I conveniently forgot that its the Congress that makes the rules, and puts pressure on the agencies to change... Having the person at the top be a nice guy isn't enough. Its our whole society that has to re-invent itself.

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August 21, 2009

Immigrant’s Death Shows Hard Path to Detention Reform

By NINA BERNSTEIN

In the fall of 2006, a man’s death brought a team of government investigators to the large privately run immigration jail in Eloy, Ariz., in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. Medical care was so poor, the team later warned federal immigration officials, that “detainee welfare is in jeopardy.”

Another death there soon spurred another inquiry, and another scathing report was issued about the care provided by the private company, the Corrections Corporation of America.

But the government scrutiny did not add up to much for Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean construction worker who wound up in Eloy that fall as an unauthorized immigrant after being jailed for petit larceny in New York City. By mid-December, a fellow detainee told the man’s relatives, Mr. Rodriguez lay pleading for medical help on the floor of his cell, unable to move.

He died weeks later of testicular cancer, a typically fast-growing but treatable disease, which had gone undiagnosed and untreated during his two months at Eloy, which holds more than 1,500 detainees. And despite a high-level discussion of his case among federal immigration officials while he was dying — captured in e-mail messages between Washington and Arizona — his death on Jan. 18, 2007, was not even listed on the roster of detention fatalities that the agency produced under pressure last year and updated in April....link to complete article