It was February 1, 2007, when Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea, fell and injured his head in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Bah, 52, had been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for overstaying a tourist visa. Bah had lived and worked in New York City for a decade, sending the money he earned to his family in Africa.
Mr. Bah died after months in a coma on May 30, 2007. In the interim, ICE officials lied to his friends and family, concealed essential details, and conspired to cover up the incident, according to documents obtained by the ACLU and the New York Times. Among the conspirators was Capt. Nina Dozoretz, CEO of Correctcare Consultants LLC and formerly the Division of Immigration Health Service’s Associate Director, which put her in charge of the over 20,000 inmates in ICE custody.
The Times initially reported on Mr. Bah's death in 2008, before the cover up was known.
"Everybody liked Boubacar," said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. "He’s a very, very, very good man."
For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his "magic hands." Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.
In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.
What happened next was Kafkaesque. Around 8 AM, guards reported a medical emergency after Mr. Bah fell near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor. He was taken to the facility's medical service, where he became incoherent and agitated, textbook signs of an intracranial injury. He was handcuffed and shackled, and when he began yelling in his native language (the video is available at the NY Times but is difficult to watch), was ordered to calm down, and when he did not, was written up for disobeying orders and was taken into solitary confinement in shackles. As this was taking place, Mr. Bah uttered his last known words in his native tongue: "Help! They are killing me!"
Shortly after this, the video record ends (guards claimed the camera's battery failed). Mr. Bah was taken to an isolation cell and locked in at 9 AM. According to the guards, Bah appeared to be sleeping for the next ten hours, but at 7:10 PM, he appeared to be breathing heavily and foaming at the mouth. The nurse on duty at that time refused to come see Mr. Bah. More than fourteen hours after the initial incident, while on rounds, an ICE nurse found Bah unconscious with vomit around his mouth. The nurse attempted to revive Bah with smelling salts and failed, and brought Bah back to the medical unit on a stretcher. At 11 PM, someone at the ICE detention facility called 911.
When Mr. Bah arrived at the hospital, it was quickly determined that he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain, and he was rushed into surgery. Back at the ICE center, the coverup began.
The following day, the ICE center at Elizabeth reported the cause of Mr. Bah's injury as "brain aneurysms" - corrected a week later to "hemorrhages" with no mention of the skull fracture or fall. Meanwhile, Mr. Bah's friends and family were ignorant that Bah had been injured for four days after the incident, only learning of it when another inmate at the facility called Mr. Bah's roommate to inform him.
It was another day before the facility disclosed Bah's location to the family, where a guard told them: "This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected." Within a week, a Times reporter heard of the incident from an immigration lawyer, and inquired on the story. At this point, the real cover-up began.
Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the Times that without the inmate's full name and eight digit Alien Registration Number, he could not check the information. But according to the records obtained now by the ACLU and the Times, Gilhooly instead notified his superiors at the agency about the reporter's inquiry, and Gilhooly, Dozoretz, and several other managers in Washington and New Jersey conferred repeatedly on how to conceal the circumstances of Mr. Bah's injuries, as well as how to avoid having the agency responsible for paying for Mr. Bah's continued care:
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, "I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter" and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 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. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
After his death, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended that Mr. Bah's body be sent to Guinea to avoid a funeral in the United States that might attract news coverage. Doing so, wrote Weber, "will go a long way to putting this matter to rest."
Mr. Bah is but one of many stories of suspicious deaths within the ICE network of facilities, and many of these stories have been brutal in the details of the abuse and neglect suffered by those in our government's care. For years, the numbers of the dead were not even counted by any government agency. But the pace of reform has quickened, albeit far too late to save the lives of scores of inmates. And far too many who have been involved in what I can only call a criminal conspiracy to conceal the truth about this remain in powerful positions within Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Please join me in contacting the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to let them know you will not tolerate this shameful behavior by your government.
Secretary Janet Napolitano
Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528
Assistant Secretary John Morton
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Washington, DC 20536