ORLANDO, Florida (CMC) — A legal permanent resident from Jamaica, who has languished in a detention centre in Louisiana for five years as his health deteriorates, has finally been freed.
Carlyle Leslie Owen Dale, 61, who had worked in New York for three decades, was released on Friday.
Immigration advocates said he seemed at risk of dying in an Oakdale, Louisiana, immigration jail, while his court
appeals against an order of deportation languished.
Advocates at the Chicago, Illinois-based National Immigrant Justice Centre (NIJC) said they had submitted an unusual petition last week to the United Nations as a last-ditch effort to win Dale’s release.
They said, as Dale’s court appeals languished, his health had “sharply declined” from diabetes, chronic asthma, liver disease, severe arthritis and high blood pressure.
An outline of Dale’s case was presented at a White House meeting in May under the heading, ‘The Next Death in Immigration Detention’, NJIC said.
The advocates said they had decided to turn to the United Nations only after “fruitless appeals” to officials at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including Phyllis Coven, the acting director of detention policy and planning, who visited Oakdale last month.
But on Friday, for the first time in five years, Dale said he woke up listening to the voices of his grandchildren — two and 12 years old — instead of to orders shouted inside the federal detention centre.
“I want to tell you how good it feels to be back in my America — the America that I love and that loves me,” he told reporters from the home of his son Dwight in Orlando, Florida.
It was an abrupt change of fortune for Dale, whose ill health had deteriorated drastically at the Oakdale Federal Detention Centre, leading to five hospitalisations in 20 months.
Last month, a US federal appeals court judge had overruled Dale’s deportation order, finding that the Board of Immigration Appeals had been wrong to conclude that a conviction in 2000 for attempted assault made him deportable as an “aggravated felon”, and sent the matter back to the board for a new decision.
The US government has been trying to deport Dale since 2005, based on his guilty plea to attempted aggravated assault in a 1998 shooting at a halfway house that he operated in Uniondale, in upstate New York, for recovering substance abusers.
Dale, who had never been in trouble with the law, served three and a half years in jail and paid more than US$9,000 in restitution to a resident whom he shot with an unregistered gun during a confrontation in which he said the resident attacked him with a knife.
Immigration officials had refused numerous requests to release Dale while his appeals were pending. And even after last week’s ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, they maintained at first that Dale was still subject to mandatory detention.
But, on Wednesday, in a settlement with his justice centre lawyers, who withdrew a pending habeas corpus petition in his case, US federal officials freed him on his own recognisance.
Claudia Valenzuela, the justice centre lawyer who represented Dale, said the case highlighted the arbitrariness of the detention system.
“The government detains individuals on a massive scale without really evaluating whether that person merits detention,” she said.
“It serves to create a system in which individuals who should never be detained in the first place, much less for years on end, find themselves deprived of their liberty, of everyday contact with family and friends, and of even basic medical services without justification,” she added.
As expected, Dale said he was overjoyed to be free again.
“My two-year-old, she’s all over me,” he said of his granddaughter, born while he was in detention. “My health is not as bad because my spirits are so high.
“I’ve been thinking about a lot of people I left there (in detention centre), people who have been going through so much hardship, and they’re still going through that.”
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