ICE Officials Covering Up Immigrant Deaths in Detention

"ICE Officials Accused of Covering Up Immigrant Deaths in Detention

The New York Times reports federal officials have used their role as overseers to prevent the media from reporting deaths inside the nations immigration jails.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement now admit 107 immigrants died in ICE custody since October 2003, but for years the deaths went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. The Times revealed jail officials and federal workers strategized about how to keep information about the deaths and mistreatment from the news media.

In at least one case, jail medical personnel falsified a medication log in an effort to cover up the death of a twenty-two-year-old man from El Salvador.

In another case, ICE officials considered paying to send the body of a Guinean man back to his home country to deflect news coverage of the mans death in ICE custody. Some Bush administration era officials who played a role in the cover-ups remain in top posts in the Obama administration." -Democracy Now!