In Custody, In Pain
Beset by Medical Problems as She Fights Deportation, A U.S. Resident Struggles to Get the Treatment She Needs
by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers
Page A1; May 12, 2008
FLORENCE, Ariz. -- Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.
She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back.
Her leg is painful and swollen from hip to foot, damaged by past surgeries and radiation treatments. Some nights, liquid seeps through cracks in her distended skin. Her left ankle is three times as big as her right. For years, she relied on a leg pump to boost her circulation and keep the swelling in check. But as an immigration detainee in this desert prison town, Harvill, 52, has been unable to persuade anyone to get her a pump, or to let her family back in Florida send hers from home.
Nor has she gotten the biopsy that a doctor has told her she needs to determine whether the spots on her liver might be tumors. And it remains uncertain whether her frequent crying spells are part of bipolar disorder, as some records suggest, or a flare-up of old anxieties -- heightened now by chronic pain, bewildering medical problems, and the fact that, three decades after she arrived from South Korea as a teenage Army bride, she is in a jail far from home with the government trying to eject her from the United States.
Harvill is one of 33,000 immigration detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, on any given day. They are locked up in a patchwork of out-of-the-way federal detention compounds, private prisons and local jails. This unnoticed prison system was built for a quick revolving door of detainees -- into custody, out of the country. But often, people linger in detention for months or years.
These detainees, like other prisoners, are by law and regulation entitled to medical services if they are sick. But Harvill's journey through immigration detention provides a glimpse into a medical system that often fails those who need it most. It is an upside-down world where patients have no say, doctors and nurses on site have little power to administer timely treatment, and a managed-care system in Washington operates from a rulebook that emphasizes what is not covered rather than what is.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d2p1.html
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