by Matthew Hay Brown
A leading Latino civil rights group is calling on the Bush administration to suspend local law enforcement of federal immigration law after an undocumented immigrant was left in an Arkansas jail cell for four days without food, water or a toilet.
Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, was arrested for selling pirated CDs at a Washington County flea market and ordered held March 6 when authorities discovered she was in the country illegally, according to news reports. A bailiff took her to a holding cell and then forgot about her.
That was a Thursday. A snowstorm hit the region, and a reduced staff at the courthouse did not hear her cries for help that night, or any of the next three days.
According to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Torres-Flores was trapped in a cell measuring nine feet by 10 feet, where she drank her own urine and used a shoe for a pillow. She finally was discovered on Monday, March 11.
Washington County is one of several local jurisdictions that have entered into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. In a letter to the department, MALDEF President John Trasviña is asking Secretary Michael Chertoff to suspend all such agreements pending a “thorough examination” of their impacts on “the civil rights of all individuals” – citizen and immigrant, legal and illegal.
“This incident illustrates that violations of basic civil rights resulting from untrained and unsupervised local law enforcement officials acting in [jurisdictions certified by the Department of Homeland Security] are no longer simply theoretical in nature,” Trasviña writes. “In this case, Washington County’s failure to adequately train and/or supervise the county sheriff’s employee was obvious.”
In a separate letter to the Justice Department, Trasviña asks Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate “any potential civil rights violations that may have occurred in Washington County, Arkansas with respect to the incident involving Ms. Torres-Flores.”
Earlier, MALDEF filed a class action lawsuit in federal court alleging racial profiling by authorities in nearby Rogers, Ark. The organization is urging senators to raise the Torres-Flores incident with Chertoff today when he appears before the Judiciary Committee.