US health official impressed with services at oft-criticized San Diego immigration jail
By Elliot Spagat, APThursday, May 27, 2010
Health official tours San Diego immigration jail
SAN DIEGO — A U.S. health official peppered doctors with questions as he toured an often-criticized immigration detention center Wednesday, saying he left impressed by what he saw and heard.
Dr. David Rutstein, the acting deputy surgeon general, asked a pharmacist if patients quickly get uncommon psychiatric drugs, whether interpeters are available to explain how the medications work and how immigrants were evaluated for medical services when they arrived.
Rutstein said his questions reflected complaints he heard about the facility. He said he didn’t learn enough to say whether critics are right but that he liked what he saw.
“I can say that the questions that I asked were professionally and correctly answered,” Rutstein said in an interview after the one-hour tour. “I can say that the staff seems incredibly competent and professional. …I can say that the physical facilities that I saw seemed top-notch.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically has more than 30,000 immigrants in its custody at hundreds of facilities nationwide, usually for about a month but sometimes for years. As its detention has grown sharply in recent years, so has criticism of conditions.
The surgeon general oversees the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which provides doctors and nurses to ICE detention centers. Rutstein said his office doesn’t set broad policies at the jails.
Rutstein, who was in San Diego for a conference, said he had never toured an immigration detention center before but hopes to visit others.
The San Diego immigration jail sits amid barren hills a short distance from the Mexican border and houses about 650 mostly male detainees. It became a target of criticism from advocacy groups after an illegal immigrant from El Salvador was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis. Francisco Castaneda was later diagnosed with penile cancer and died in 2008 at age 36.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued ICE in 2007, alleging medical care at the detention center was inadequate. The lawsuit, which is pending in federal court in San Diego, says detainees often wait weeks or months to see a doctor or nurse and are denied necessary treatments.
