Inhumane face of Immigration Officers

I am an immigrant to Canada from India and I bet you can trust the police here unlike the one back in the home country.

Here, if you need to travel leaving wife and little kids back home, you can just dial police and ask them to take care of them while you will be away, something which is not even thinkable back home in India.

However, the same very police, when deals with illegal immigrants have a different face, which is similar to one seen in Bihar, back home. In a shocking incident, an immigrant who had overstayed his student visa, was jailed for 2 years and then drugged and deported despite having been given a temporary stay of removal by the ninth circuit court.

He tried to show the agents his court documents but they wouldn't listen. They injected him with a very strong drug, possibly haloperidol, an antipsychotic agent, and deported him against his will and against the court order.

Just last month, ICE changed its policy and in the future must seek a court order for authority to administer drugs to people being deported.

The government did not admit wrongdoing or apologize in its settlement.

Why did the immigrant overstay his Visa? He married a U.S. citizen. However, that and a court order wasn't enough to stop ICE from torturing him with Haldol. Diouf had attended California State University, Northridge, and later married a U.S. citizen. He was detained on March 29, 2005, for overstaying a student visa.

As the investigations revealed, a total of 56 healthy immigrants were given forced medication by ICE in 2006 and 2007. Only a doctor is allowed to prescribe medication and medical ethics require that medication be prescribed for the good of the patient. The agents who injected this immigrant violated federal drug laws. If a doctor signed off on this use of medications, he should be removed from the practice of medicine.

Forced drugging of anyone is a gross violation of human rights. Forced drugging with Haldol is particularly abusive because the drug is so disabling in high doses. It can cause severe, permanent side effects such as Parkinson-like symptoms, akathisia, dyskinesia, dystonia, hyperreflexia, rigidity, opisthotonos, and, occasionally, oculogyric crisis are the most frequently reported side effects associated with the administration of haloperidol. Headache, vertigo and cerebral seizures have also been reported.