African American, Immigrant and Refugee Forge Common Agenda.

In just three days, the lie that said that U.S. born African Americans reject humane immigration reform was utterly destroyed. In Baltimore, MD this weekend over fifty blacks from throughout the United States joined together to build the Black Immigration Network (BIN). The network will be made up of organizations and people of African descent who reside in the United States. Continue reading here:

Inhumane Detention Centers in America Part II.

One immigrant detained in 2007 was Amina Mudey.
She fled Somalia after her father, brothers and sister were murdered. Amina landed in New York and requested political asylum. "The medical treatment that Amina received was absolutely deplorable. Substandard, sanction-able, and flat out malpractice," says Ann Schofield Baker, Amina's lawyer. Schofield Baker says Amina was detained in the former New Jersey warehouse facility and almost immediately was prescribed a powerful anti-psychotic drug called "Risperdal." "How did she come to be on Risperdal to begin with? I mean, was she psychotic?" Pelley asks. "Not even remotely psychotic," Schofield Baker says. "When Amina first arrived at the detention center she hadn't slept in two or three days. She hadn't eaten. She'd never been on a plane before. She was disoriented. They brought her to the facility shackled. She was absolutely petrified. And she collapsed and had a panic attack. From that, someone concluded that she was psychotic." Schofield Baker says on Risperdal, Amina was dazed, drooling and helpless. A human rights group asked her to represent Amina. She got her own doctors, who took Amina off the drug. And Amina was granted asylum. Now Amina is studying computers and English.

What was it like when you walked out of there?" Pelley asks.

"Outside was beautiful," Amina says, with the help of a translator.

"It was a tough start for you," Pelley remarks.

"America is wonderful place. I like it, New York," Amina answers in English.

Amina's alleged misdiagnosis isn't an isolated case according to an internal memo from last year, written by the head of mental health at the Division of Immigration Health Services.

"The top psychologist worried about mental health,” Priest says, as she quotes from an email he wrote: 'We need to stop looking for Band-Aid solutions for these problems.”

"The little money managed care may save in the short run is going to be dwarfed by the millions that will be paid out by ICE when the lawsuits roll in.There have been just a handful of lawsuits so far. But they know they're sitting on a powder keg."

Inhumane Detention Centers in America.

Since 9/11 there have been a lot of changes in how the United States deals with immigrants. One of the biggest is the explosive growth of a system of immigrant detention centers that few Americans know anything about.

Immigrants who come into the country illegally, or refugees who apply for political asylum, often go into detention, some for many months. Before 9/11, about 100,000 detainees went though the system each year. Today, with stricter immigration rules, that number has tripled to more than 300,000.

In 2004, United Nations troops were fighting militant gangs in the streets of Haiti. Eighty-one-year-old Reverend Joseph Dantica, a Baptist minister, saw his church ransacked during the unrest, so he fled to the United States and asked for political asylum. His niece, Edwidge Danticat (her last name is spelled differently than her uncle's) says he was taken straight to a U.S. immigration detention center.

"He was essentially arrested?" Pelley asks.

"Yes. I consider it an arrest," Danticat says. "Because …he had to ask for special relief for him not to be handcuffed. And they did allow him that, but told him that if he ran, they would shoot him."

Rev. Dantica raised Edwidge in Haiti; she moved to the U.S. at the age of 12 and grew up to become a prize-winning author. Danticat's recent book, "Brother, I'm Dying," recounts her uncle's ordeal.

She was waiting for him in Miami.

Asked what she was thinking when she heard her uncle had been detained, Danticat tells Pelley, "Well, I was horrified. Eighty one years old and, after the ordeal that he had been through in Haiti, I worried about his ability to handle that."

Records show that two days later, during an asylum hearing, he became violently ill and collapsed. A detention center physician's assistant failed to recognize that Dantica was in serious trouble.

"Help me understand from the records that you've seen precisely what the medic said about your uncle and his condition," Pelley asks.

"It appears that he said, 'I think he's faking,' or something to that effect," Danticat says.

It took four hours to get Rev. Dantica to an outside hospital. His family wasn't allowed to see him. In a day and a half, Rev. Dantica was dead. The medical examiner said it was pancreatitis.

Asked what she was thinking in that moment, Danticat says, "Just a series of things.”

Crying, she continues, "Of course, you know, a great deal of sadness because he died so alone."
"He died without his family," Pelley remarks.

"Yeah. And after being treated like an animal," Danticat says. "Someone who was just trying to escape horrible things, who was so old and sick. Just had to die that way."

But in one sense, Rev. Dantica was not alone: he's among hundreds of sick or dying detainees inside 22 detention centers, plus some 350 state and local jails. The federal lock-ups range from a former warehouse in New Jersey that houses 325 people, to a desert facility near the Mexican border.

The centers are run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by its initials "ICE."

Inside the detention centers, medical care is provided by another federal agency, the Division of Immigration Health Services, or DIHS. Reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post have been investigating DIHS.

"This is not just some deaths or just some sick people anecdotally. If you take them all together, they show poor medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, sloppy paperwork, lost medical records and very dangerous staffing levels," Priest explains.

Priest, who contributes to 60 Minutes, and Goldstein have obtained thousands of internal DIHS documents. They include investigations, e-mails, autopsy reports and complaints.

What sort of a picture did the documents paint of how DIHS is working? "
They show a bureaucracy that offers many immigrants no care or slow care or poor care," Priest says. "And they also show that the employees inside are panicked about this.

For example last year, 21-year-old detainee Juan Guevara was complaining of severe headaches. Soon he had died of a brain aneurysm. A staff member wrote in an e-mail "the detainee was prescribed Tylenol. The detainee was not seen or evaluated by an RN, midlevel (physician's assistant) or physician."

This internal report from 2007 was written after another detainee died of a contagious infection: "the clinical staff at all levels failed to recognize early signs and symptoms of meningitis."

This memo from 2007 sounds an alarm over staffing shortages in Buffalo, written in all caps, "CRITICAL STAFFING SITUATION OCCURRING, SITE IS DOWN TO ONLY 3 FULL TIME NURSES." In Arizona, "CRITICAL STAFFING levels. Site has reached a 48% nursing vacancy rate."

While the number of immigrants in detention has tripled since 9/11, the health services budget has grown only by 65 percent.

Priest reads from an email from the acting director of DIHS to a senior ICE official in August 2007: “We're facing critical staffing shortages at most every site. While we developed, executed and achieved major successes in our recruitment efforts, we've been unable to meet the demand."

If you are still skeptical that America is on fear and ignorance. Just wait when the see the 140,000 Iraqis applications for Residency in U.S.

They are using anything as scapegoats against others for their constant fear..

DAMASCUS, Syria—Thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria have applied for resettlement in the United States, a U.N. refugee agency official in the Syrian capital said Wednesday.
Laurens Jolles, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Damascus, said the office has registered some 140,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria, where the bulk of Iraqis fled to escape the violence in their war-ravaged homeland.

Jolles told The Associated Press that 6,700 of them applied this year for resettlement, including 4,662 seeking to resettle in the U.S.

A U.S. State Department spokesman in Washington declined immediate comment.

Syria is home to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees and says the influx has strained its education, health and housing systems, pushing the government to tighten visa requirements and to call for international assistance.

Despite frosty relations with Washington, Damascus recently agreed to allow American interviewers into the country to screen the Iraqis for admission to the United States. The move followed a visit here last month by senior U.S. envoys James Foley and Lori Scialabba, a top immigration official with Homeland Security.

Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries in the region are sheltering more than 2 million Iraqis who have fled since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Already, several hundred refugees from Syria have been given permission to resettle in Finland, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia this year.

The U.S. plans to admit 12,000 Iraqi refugees in a year's time. But only 450 were let in last month—less than half the monthly average needed to reach the target.

The Bush administration has conceded a moral obligation to assist Iraqi refugees, but the slow pace of admissions has sparked criticism from refugee advocates and lawmakers.

The blame has been placed on bureaucratic slowdowns—including bickering between the State Department, which is in charge of refugee resettlement, and Homeland Security, which must screen all refugees for admission. Those from Iraq are subjected to additional security checks because of fears of terrorism.