The New York Times reports the sad and revolting story of a man whose life in New York City diverged from "probable green card" to "detainee treated worse than convicted felon". In 2007, "Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons." When he went for a green card hearing, he was detained for an immigration violation and taken to jail.
In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.
Link: New York Times' In-Custody Deaths Topic Page -- The page collects NY Times articles and outside links to related material on the problem of detainee deaths in the United States. As they say on the front page of the section: "On any given day, about 31,000 people who are not American citizens are held in detention in a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities while the government decides whether to deport them. Getting details about those who die in custody is a difficult undertaking left to family members, advocacy groups and lawyers."
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
