mentally ill and stuck in immigration limbo

This article, Illegal Immigrant is Mentally Ill and Stuck in Immigration Limbo, has been making its way around the Web for some time—blessedly, as this story wouldn't have been discovered were it not for a lucky mistake.

Several blogs have reposted the lead. (Angry Asian Man and Racialicious.com's Thea Lim wrote persuasively on the subject.) The article is by Nina Bernstein:

Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.

“Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.

She was a waitress with no criminal record, no lawyer and a history of attempted suicide. Her reply to the judge’s threat, captured by the court transcript, was in imperfect English. “Sir, I not — cannot go home,” she said, referring to China, which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at 20. “If I die, I die America.”

The judge moved on. “The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear,” he said for the record. And as she declared, “I’m going to die now,” he entered an order deporting her to China, and sent her back to the Glades County immigration jail.

No matter what your alignment in the immigration debate, you must by now realize that the courts are tragically botching these cases.

This entry was posted by Marianna, on Saturday, May 30, 2009. You can leave your response.