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NRI held for alleged
immigration violations go on hunger-strike to protest poor US jail conditions
Several detainees, including Indians, held for alleged immigration violations at a high-security jail in Queens borough are refusing food to protest their detention and poor prison conditions. The detained people, among them 30-year-old Makham Singh from India, have gone on a hunger strike demanding they be treated humanely and their cases be reviewed. They have also asked that all non-criminal prisoners be released so they can be reunited with their families, according to a report in theNew York Daily News Singh and several of the others detained for alleged immigration violations are married to US citizens and have American children. Yet the government has released no information about their status or what their future might be. The Wackenhut prison where they have been detained is a warehouse building with no windows in Springfield Gardens, Queens. Makham Singh was quoted by the Daily News as saying: "Nobody is eating. They bring us food and we send it back." Singh has a wife and two children who are American citizens. He has been in Wackenhut for the past six months. There are 175 inmates inside the detention centre. "We need people to know about our situation," Singh was quoted as saying. "We must be heard, and we will starve if we have to." Most of the inmates were picked up in the aftermath of 9/11 and have been held without criminal charges or due process and, in some cases, without access to a lawyer, said Bobby Khan, a member of the Coney Island Avenue Project, a rights group based in the Pakistani community in Brooklyn. Khan was quoted as saying: "The food is insufficient and inadequate,
and even though some of the detainees have heart conditions or suffer
from diabetes and ulcers, medical care is practically nonexistent." |
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