US officials used their role as overseers of the country's immigrant detention centres to cover up evidence of mistreatment and deflect scrutiny by the media, The New York Times has reported.
Citing documents in its possession, the newspaper said that investigators had concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the 2007 suicide of a 22-year-old immigrant detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that medical personnel at the jail had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin.
But the fake entry was easy to detect, the report said. When the drug was supposedly administered, Romero was already dead.
Those findings were never disclosed to the public or Romero's relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg.
In February 2007, in the case of a dying African man, the immigration agency's spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a reporter's questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, the paper said.
But records show he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter's interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah.
Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called, The Times pointed out.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of media exposure, the report said.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, the paper noted.
Eventually, faced with paying 10,000 dollars a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: humanitarian release'' to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him, The Times said.
But days before the planned release, Bah died.
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