Sick Detained Immigrant to Appeal to U.N. for Help

New York Times: A 61-year-old Jamaican man who spent three decades working in New York is likely to die of medical neglect in a Louisiana immigration detention center unless the United Nations intervenes, says an urgent petition that his advocates plan to submit to the international organization on Friday. The unusual petition is a last-ditch effort to win the release of the ailing man, Carlyle Leslie Owen Dale, a legal permanent resident who has been held for deportation for more than five years as his court appeals languished and his health sharply declined from diabetes, chronic asthma, liver disease, severe arthritis and high blood pressure. On Thursday afternoon, his advocates at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago learned of a new development that added weight to their argument that his detention was arbitrary and unjustified: The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had overruled Mr. Dale’s deportation order, finding that the Board of Immigration Appeals had wrongly concluded that his 2000 conviction for attempted assault made him deportable as an “aggravated felon.” The court sent the case back to the board for a new decision.