ICE: Drugged deportees with powerful Anti-Psychotic medication.

Federal immigration officials, over the past year, have dramatically curtailed the controversial practice of sedating deportees with powerful anti-psychotic medication.

The move followed court challenges and a public outcry over the practice, which often involved the use of Haldol, a drug used to treat schizophrenia.

Data collected through Freedom of Information Act requests by The Dallas Morning News show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement sedated only 10 people in the past fiscal year. Haldol was used in only three cases.

Over the past six years, through October, federal immigration personnel sedated 384 deportees, an average of 64 a year, the government disclosed. Of those cases, 356 involved the use of Haldol.

U.S. officials defended the sedation policy but declined to discuss it in detail, including the frequency with which sedation has been used, which led The News to request the information through the Freedom of Information Act.

U.S. officials say the procedure is done on the recommendation of medical personnel and now requires a court order – a change made when the American Civil Liberties Union began opposing the procedure and after Julie L. Myers, then assistant homeland security secretary, learned of the cases.

"When we do ask the court to involuntarily sedate, it is both necessary to effectuate removal and medically appropriate," said Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.

Critics said there had been no effective oversight of the process, and some continue to say that the policy violates medical ethics. They praised the use of the court order and sedation restrictions.

"What you are seeing here is that the courts have proven once again that sunshine is the best disinfectant," said Wade Henderson, a lawyer and the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.

Though the agency has dramatically reduced its use of Haldol to sedate deportees, the practice remains controversial.

Haldol is used to treat schizophrenia and such psychotic symptoms as hallucinations, delusions and hostility.

It is sometimes used in hospital emergency rooms to manage acute agitation and psychosis.

Medical authorities say the use of Haldol carries potential complications. The drug can trigger such adverse reactions as muscular spasms and a condition known as neuroleptic malignant syndrome that can result in a coma and even death if left untreated.

Scott Allen, an internist and co-founder of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I., said he opposes sedation except for deportees with schizophrenia or other mental illness.

"The medical community needs to assert itself and make clear the medical ethics of involuntary chemical restraint: It is not acceptable," he said.

As for its decline in use, Dr. Allen said, "That is certainly encouraging, but it enforces the impression they were overusing forced medication in the past."


New policy

ICE established the policy of requiring a court order for involuntary sedation of detainees during removal with "no exceptions" in January. ICE said it restated a policy from June 2007.

Ms. Myers, who resigned as assistant homeland security secretary, said she moved toward a policy of "getting a court order so only in the narrowest of circumstances would we proceed like this."

She defined the narrow circumstances in which sedation would be used as those in which the agency believes that "based on the advice of medical professional, that this is the only way to have a safe and secure deportation, and a court agrees with that."

The policy went into effect in June 2007 after the Los Angeles Daily Journal reported that two detainees had been forcibly drugged in an effort to sedate them for a deportation flight.

Last year, the ACLU sued the U.S. government on behalf of the two immigrants, one from Senegal and another from Indonesia. Attorneys for the men believe both were given Haldol. The case was settled for $55,000 in total for the two, and the government admitted no wrongdoing or liability.

In November 2007, the federal government attempted to get a court order to sedate an Albanian man who resisted deportation and boarding from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, screaming he would be killed if he were sent back to Albania.

The man, a political-asylum seeker, was aided by U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, who wrote a private bill that effectively stalled the Albanian's deportation until early 2009.


Government data

The government's FOIA disclosures don't indicate whether all 384 sedations were forced or voluntary. But government officials and lawyers who have represented deportees said it is clear that a significant number were involuntarily sedated.

"Immigrants are not animals," said Ahilan Arulanantham, the ACLU attorney involved in the lawsuit against Homeland Security.

A FOIA request for government data for the five fiscal years prior to Oct. 1, 2002, was denied because the federal government said it was unable to locate any records.

The issue of sedations drew further attention in May, when The Washington Post reported its use in more than 250 cases.

The report was based in part on information from the confidential medical logs of deportees.

Even before the policy shift, the practice was used in a relative handful of deportations. In fiscal year 2007, more than 240,000 people went through deportation proceedings.


Race as a factor

The documents show that sedation was used disproportionately against Africans, leading some to suggest that race was a factor.

"The racial dimensions add a particularly troubling dimension to what was already an unacceptable regime of choices," said Mr. Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

U.S. officials deny that race was a factor.

"Nationality is purely coincidental," said Ms. Reilly, the ICE spokeswoman.

Over the six years, nearly 40 percent of those sedated with Haldol were Africans. No other continent had that high a percentage. The cases cover a period from October 2002 through October of this year.

According to the federal data, sedations with Haldol were scattered among deportees from all over Africa, but clusters can be found among deportees from Guinea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Senegal and Uganda.


On their own

Former Dallas resident Stanley Ukeni of Nigeria was deported in October 2007 after overstaying a visitor visa by more than a decade.

Mr. Ukeni pleaded with immigration officials to let him stay in the U.S., saying he had provoked the wrath of high-ranking officials in Nigeria with human-rights work he had done there on behalf of the Ibo tribe. He said he feared he would be tortured if he returned.

According to Mr. Ukeni, immigration officials gave him a choice: He could land in Lagos, Nigeria, sedated and manacled, or he could remain unsedated, fully conscious and better able to protect himself from harm. He chose to go peacefully and avoided sedation.

In a phone conversation from a relative's home in Nigeria, Mr. Ukeni said he would like to return "home" to Dallas, where he has two small U.S.-born children with his girlfriend. E-mails from Mr. Ukeni and a letter from his Nigerian attorney asserted that Mr. Ukeni had been abducted and severely beaten several times since his return.

ICE officials would not discuss specifics of Mr. Ukeni's case.

But Ms. Reilly acknowledged that deportees are on their own once they arrive in their home country.

"When we remove a person from the United States," she said, "our authority over them ends when they leave an aircraft in their country of origin.

VIP Invitation from ICE draw no takers.!!!!!!!!

The Bush Administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement has launched a new initiative which encourages Undocumented Immigrants with no criminal background in the U.S. to surrender to authorities but why not enforce the Law with a real criminals, sexual offenders, sexual predators rather to despite the Federal Sources. with a nonsense brainer.!!!!!!!! I believe that a government ad campaign is employing scare tactics to pressure undocumented workers to self-deport but it won't work.
That invitation drew hardly any takers on the first day of a new federal ``self-deportation'' program that offered 457,000 eligible Undocumented immigrants the chance to turn themselves in, get their affairs in order and leave the country without being detained.

The tepid response only reinforced doubts about an idea that has drawn criticism and even ridicule from both sides of the immigration debate.

"You would have to be crazy - who would want to turn themselves in?" said Angel Martinez, a construction worker who waited Tuesday outside ICE's Charlotte, N.C., office while his son visited a friend detained on immigration violations

My punishment does not fit my crime. Dysfunctional and inhumane Immigration system

The family of a Welshman detained in a US prison today spoke of their disgust over his treatment across the Atlantic.

Zak Ashenhurst, 35, who was born in Barry but raised in America, is being held in a jail in California as he awaits deportation over a firearms offence he committed as a 17-year-old, as revealed in yesterday’s Echo.

Today, his cousin Chris Case, 41, of Earl Crescent, Barry, said: “I can’t believe what they’re doing to him. It’s just wrong.

“His brother has served in the American army and his wife and kids are all American.

“He was charged 20-odd years ago and he’s been in no trouble since. He’s paid his penalty.”

Dad-of-two Mr Ashenhurst was detained under American legislation allowing foreign nationals with a criminal record to be detained for months and eventually deported, irrespective of the severity of the offence or time lapsed since the conviction.

Mr Ashenhurst’s crime was to fire a gun into an empty swimming pool as a prank nearly 20 years ago. He was fined and the offence was seemingly forgotten before he even reached his twenties.

Now a married family man, he runs his own business as well as working for Hewlett Packard and coaching children’s sports in his spare time.

It is not known how long Mr Ashenhurst will have to remain in jail before he is deported.

When the dad is eventually allowed to leave, he and his family hope to return to Barry, where they will stay with Mr Case.

Mr Case, who runs Big Blue Aquatics tropical fish house in Caerphilly, said he would help his cousin find work and a place to live in South Wales. “He won’t go back to America after all this,” said Mr Case.

“His wife won’t want to be apart from him so she will have to come over with the kids as well. But we don’t even know how long it’s going to be before they let him leave prison and come over here.”

Mr Ashenhurst’s mother Judith first took her children to live in America in 1979 but has returned to the UK following her son’s ordeal. She suffers from health problems following a stroke and is being cared for by her sister in Yorkshire.

“She’s in a hell of a mess,” said Mr Case.

“I’ve never seen her looking so worried before. She’s under so much stress because of what’s happened to Zak.

“I know my auntie’s had enough now. She won’t be going back to America any time soon.

Self Deportation program did not work.

No one showed up Tuesday as a new federal program encouraging Undocumented immigrants to leave the country began a two-week trial, and several Undocumented immigrants said there's no reason to expect anyone will.

"I know people who have been caught and deported. But most are never caught," said Robert Hernandez, a 28-year-old construction worker from Honduras who has lived in the United States Undocumented for four years.

"To turn yourself in so you can go home and live in a village with no work? If I wanted to do that, I would have stayed in my village. I wouldn't have risked my life to come here in the first place."

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched Operation Scheduled Departure in five cities, and none found any takers by the day's end.

The self-deportation trial offer is being offered to the nation's 457,000 eligible Undocumented immigrants - fugitives with an otherwise clean criminal history who have been caught and ignored an immigration judge's order to leave. The program runs through Aug. 22 in Charlotte, San Diego, Chicago, Phoenix and Santa Ana, Calif.

Undocumented immigrants who participate will get up to 90 days to pull together money to pay for family members to return home with them and take care of other arrangements. If they don't have enough money for their own ticket home, ICE will cover the tab, said Ivan Ortiz, an agency spokesman in Charlotte to promote the program.

Undocumented immigrants have flocked to the Carolinas during the past decade, as tens of thousands of immigrants have moved to the region to work in construction, agriculture, restaurants, hotels and poultry plants. Robert Alfieri, the supervisory deportations officer in ICE's Charlotte office, said the agency apprehended 900 Undocumented immigrants last year. He said many want to go back home.

"For them, it's getting too hard to hide. They have the stress of looking over their shoulders," he said. "They know there's a lot of law enforcement looking for them. This is their way to go home.

"For anyone to say no one will do it, that's absolutely wrong."

In Charlotte, authorities promoted the program in Spanish-language media, including local radio stations. But Angel Martinez, a 45-year-old construction worker from Mexico City who has lived in the U.S. Undocumented for 15 years, said most Undocumented immigrants will ignore the offer, especially as they "remember what life was like, how hard it was" before they moved to the U.S.

Martinez was waiting outside the ICE office while his 19-year-old son visited a friend inside who had been detained by authorities after he was stopped for speeding and found to be an Undocumented immigrant.

"It's stupid. You would have to be crazy," he said. "Who would want to turn themselves in?"

Raids in Postville, Iowa. leading our nation to a moral, legal and humanitarian crisis.









Postville, Iowa, has been turned into a ghost town. Nearly a third of its residents, mostly undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico, sit in jail convicted of identity crimes or awaiting deportation. Hundreds more hide in fear. Their children, too scared to go to school, have left the town's classrooms nearly empty. For this, Postville should thank their local police, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), and a failed immigration policy.

Aided by local law enforcement, ICE arrested 389 workers during the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history at the Postville meatpacking plant, the area's major employer. In an unprecedented move, ICE criminally charged 302 of these workers with aggravated ID theft and/or using false social security numbers. Within days, ICE resolved their fate: 297 men and women pled guilty and were sentenced to prison and subsequent deportation. Only a few await criminal trials or immigration hearings.

Postville is one of the latest in a series of immigration raids that have intensified in the past three years. These raids are leading our nation to a moral, legal and humanitarian crisis.


Lawmakers on Thursday questioned the legality and effectiveness of the government’s tactics in a May raid that led to the arrest of nearly 400 immigrants.

The crackdown on a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa _ called Agriprocessors _ represented the largest single immigration raid in the nation’s history. Most of the workers, who faced charges of aggravated identity theft for using immigration or Social Security numbers that did not belong to them, accepted plea agreements on a lesser charge of Social Security fraud. Most now face five months of jail followed by deportation.

The raid has come under fire from immigration reform groups and now lawmakers who objected to group prosecutions that they say violated due process and who criticized the decision to disproportionately go after workers instead of employers.

"This looks and feels like a cattle auction, not a criminal prosecution in the United States," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a former immigration lawyer and chair of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, which held a five-hour hearing Thursday on the Postville raid.

The workers were given seven days to decide whether to accept the plea agreement, and they appeared in groups of 10 at the plea hearings.

"Defendants did not know what a Social Security number was," said Erik Camayd-Freixas, one of the interpreters brought in to translate at the court proceedings.

Deborah Rhodes, senior associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, defended the "fast-tracking" process, which she said averted flooding the courts and resulted in reduced sentences.

Lawmakers also expressed concern about the government’s priorities, arguing that the mass raid complicated an existing investigation into labor, food safety and environmental violations at the Agriprocessors plant.

Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, whose district borders Postville, said he was concerned that rounding up, jailing and deporting the plant’s workers would impede the Department of Labor’s investigation.

"Unless we enforce our laws equally against both employees and employers who break the law, we will continue to have a serious problem with illegal immigration in this country," Braley said.

Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason



The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places

Source: Washington Post

U.S. KIDS CITIZENS TEAR APART FROM PARENTS FROM ICE (Institute Constitutional Eraser).

We Are Workers, Not Criminals. .






In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May Day in 2006 and 2007, 2008 one sign said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to this country to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here, not people who mean it harm. Again this May Day, immigrant workers filled the streets, making the same point.

Yet today the federal government is taking actions that make holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, are passing measures that go even further. These actions need a reality check.

Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn't correct a mismatch between the Social Security number they'd provided their employer, and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number.

With 12 million people living in the United States without legal immigration status, the regulation would lead to massive firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt. Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well, since the Social Security database is often inaccurate.

Under Chertoff the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting and deporting thousands of workers. Many have been charged with an additional crime—identity theft—because they used a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet workers using another number actually deposit money into that holder's social security account, and these immigrants will never collect benefits their contributions paid for.

The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, which is even more incomplete and full of errors than Social Security. They must fire workers whose names get flagged. And Mississippi passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested. Employers get immunity.

Congress is now debating two bills, the SAVE Act and the New Employee Verification Act that would require similar use of the E-Verify database.

In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime, for the first time in our history, to hire people without papers. Defenders argued that if people could not legally work they would leave. Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They will not simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that everyone else in our country believes in.

For most, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they've come. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan community leader in Fresno, says, "The North American Free Trade Agreement made the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the United States to work because there's no alternative."

When Congress passed NAFTA, six million displaced people came to the United States as a result. If Congress stops passing new free trade agreements, and instead faces the damage NAFTA and other pro-corporate measures did in Mexico, the poverty and desperation that fuel migration can eventually be reversed.

Trying to push people out of the United States who've come here for survival simply won't work. The price of trying is that the vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase. Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny overtime, minimum wage, or fire workers when they protest or organize. Increased vulnerability ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. Children live in fear that their parents will be picked up in raids.

After deporting over 1,000 workers at Swift meatpacking plants, Chertoff called for linking "effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.'' The government is really after giving cheap labor to large employers. Deportations, firings, and guest-worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder. They contribute to a climate of fear and insecurity for everyone.

Instead of making work a crime and treating immigrants as criminals, we need a humane, equality, economic security, jobs, and rights for everyone.

Since when and why we as Hispanics, Latinos become the Enemy and being treated as Terrorists?

Immigration Agents to Stop Sedating Deportees.

LOS ANGELES — U.S. immigration agents must not sedate deportees without a judge's permission, according to a policy change issued this week.

Immigration officials have acknowledged that 56 deportees were given psychotropic drugs during a seven-month period in 2006 and 2007 even though most had no history of mental problems. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit over the practice.

An internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo dated Wednesday and obtained by The Associated Press on Friday said effective immediately, agents must get a court order before administering drugs "to facilitate an alien's removal."

"There are no exceptions to this policy," said the memo written by John Torres, detention and removal director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

To get a sedation order from court, officials must show deportees have a history of physical resistance to being removed or are a danger to themselves.

ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice verified the memo's authenticity.

"Medical sedation will only be considered as a last resort," she said

The ACLU sued the agency in June to stop the practice, alleging it could constitute torture and violates the Bill of Rights and federal laws regarding the medical treatment of detainees.

The lawsuit, which is still pending, came after a handful of immigrants in Southern California claimed to have been drugged while the government attempted to deport them.

Senate testimony last year revealed that 33 of 56 deportees involuntarily given psychotropic drugs had no history of psychological problems. They were given the medicine because of "combative behavior," said Julie Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.