This story is not really news to me in general, for I knew long before now that Hispanic immigrants, legal or not, are often dealt a bad hand from law enforcement with regard to basic human dignity and human rights.

Take the case of Armando Ojeda-Jimenez, who before his death in an Oconee County, South Carolina detention center, lived in Walhalla, S.C., part of the coverage area of a paper for which I used to work. As the story says, he was apprehended in a ditch and booked for public disorderly conduct. Later that day, he complained of vomiting and police gave him Phenergan and Maalox for the symptoms. He had been drinking. By 10:44 p.m., the man had died of cardiac arrest. I posit there probably wasn’t any explicit malfeasance on the part of the law, other than, perhaps, a general lackadaisical approach to the man’s complaints (“Ahh, he’s just drunk. He’ll sleep it off.”). For instance, did they ask the Jimenez before giving him Phenergan if he had any heart problems or if he was a heavy drinker, both of which could have implications if that drug is administered? Who knows? Maybe it was just his time, but my hunch is that this fellow’s death was perhaps unnecessary had officials taken his complaints more seriously (by checking potential drug interactions, past medical history, etc.). Petty criminal or not, death should not be something with which we are comfortable in any case.

His sister-in-law called my former paper and gave this telling statement,

He is a person, and he does belong to a family. He’s been here for 10 years.

The New York Times recently blew the roof off similar cases in this May 5, 2008 article, in which illegals are being locked up and being denied basic human rights that should be, illegal or not, afforded to all:

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

Heck, it’s hard enough for even journalists to get clear answers from government officials. How much harder is it for the families of illegal immigrants?

And this cuts at the heart of the CNN story. Sure, many Hispanics in this country are here illegally. Sure, they should have tried to go about it the legal way (I will ignore the enormous heap of bureacracy through which one must navigate to even attempt to gain citizenship), but as I say frequently, these are people, and as the sister-in-law said, they are people with families who love them. They are attempting to make a better life for their families — in essence, to turn a life of relegated poverty for their wife and kids to a life of potential and hope. It is a brute fact that they are here, and we must work within that framework. We can’t herd them all up and ship them back; that is nonsensical. We should come up with a way to make the citizenship process less chaotic and less drawn out for applicants (and it is both), and we should, for those who are already here and working with clean track records, supply a ready and easy way (to coin a John Milton line) to citizenship.

As a side note: in the Northeast Georgia county in which I live now, the economic situation has gotten so severe that many Hispanics are, in fact, pulling out and moving elsewhere to find work because it simply doesn’t exist anymore in the county they once called home. I wrote a story reporting that very thing. One authentic Mexican restaurant which serves honest-to-God, regional Mexican cuisine (not Tex-Mex) and which once had a flourishing Hispanic clientele (Its menu is in all Spanish) now has a majority gringo customer base. And some of the Hispanics who are left in the county can be found each morning huddled in front of a local laundry mat hoping for some contractor or some developer to pick them up for a day’s worth of labor. When I went down there to attempt to speak with a couple of them about their situation, I do believe some of them thought I was there to offer them work. Now that’s sad.