The abuse of Caribbean, African and other immigrants is being aired at last.

As many as 107 immigrants from around the world, including men and women from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America have died in privately run U.S. government immigration jails since October 2003.

And there is increasing evidence that officials of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ICE, and executives of the private firms that run the detention centers in Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, Arizona and other parts of the country, may have engaged in a concerted effort to hide the evidence about the real causes of the deaths, most of which have been attributed by the relatives of the victims, union executives who represent ICE employees and others familiar with the nightmare, to poor health care in the prisons as well as physical and mental abuse.

Some of the victims came from Barbados, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, Guinea and El Salvador.

"Because ICE investigates itself, there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement" in the conditions under which the immigrants were being held, complained Chris Crane, a vice president of the union which represents some of ICE's employees.

"There are quite horrible medical stories," Marc Raimondi, an ICE official, once warned the agency's top management about the conditions in the jails and the possibility that they would mushroom into a "damaging national story that takes on long legs."

Actually, Raimondi's written warning, which has been disclosed by the American Civil Liberties Union, was prepared in 2007, about two years after a 52-year-old Barbadian, Sandra Kenley, had died, reportedly because of an appalling lack of healthcare at the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover County and a facility in Portsmouth in Virginia.

The Bajan's death attracted national media attention and was even investigated by the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Membership, and by the America Civil Liberties Union.

Kenley's sister, June Everett, later filed a $2 million law suit, alleging that the Bajan had died because the authorities who ran the jail had failed to provide her with the medication she badly needed for hypertension, and the surgery required for a fibroid and uterine bleeding.

Tom Jawetz, an ACLU immigration lawyer for the National Prison Project, commenting on Kenley, had also complained to the House panel that health care was a "serious and growing problem in immigration detention – horribly inadequate medical care that leads to unnecessary suffering and deaths."

Now, thanks to the ACLU, which obtained official U.S. government [confirmation] about the deaths of the immigrants, the full scope of the largely hidden tragedy is now becoming clear. And the nightmare has landed in the lap of the Obama Administration, which has vowed to clean up the mess left behind the Bush Administration. The White House says it would be a part of an extensive revamping of the immigration service.

Hundreds of West Indians, including Jamaicans, Haitians, Grenadians, St. Lucia, Guyanese, Barbadians and others from the region are now being held in some of the detention facilities.

According to the federal government documents secured under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act:

• A Salvadoran immigrant who was being detained pending deportation to his birthplace committed suicide, partly because of unbearable pain he was suffering from a broken leg. Nery Romero was being detained in New Jersey and his relatives accused officials of the jail of withholding medication that would have eased his pain. He hanged himself.

• About two years after Kenley, the Bajan grandmother, had died in Virginia, a 52-year-old immigrant from Guinea, Boubacar Bah, died in an immigration prison in New Jersey after he had undergone emergency brain surgery. The documents showed that while the man was critically ill, immigration authorities decided to release him to his relatives on "humanitarian" grounds so as to avoid having to provide him with expensive health care. He succumbed two days before his so-called "humanitarian release."

• Some nine immigrants died at a detention center in Arizona in recent years. One of them, Emmanuel Owusu, was being held pending deportation because of a conviction for battery and shoplifting, misdemeanor offences. The 62-year-old barber from Ghana was a diabetic with high blood pressure.

• An ICE official in Newark even went so far as to recommend that the body of an African immigrant, who had died in custody because of a reported lack of health, be shipped back to his native land at U.S. taxpayer's expense, in order to avoid negative media publicity should his wife turn up on U.S. soil to claim his body.

• An ICE spokesman had warned his bosses that a national newspaper was investigating 19 deaths of immigrants being kept in jail. One was a man suffering from penile cancer which had spread to the rest of his body because of a misdiagnosis while in detention.

Like the relatives of other victims, the sister of the Barbadian had complained that Kenley, a legal immigrant for 30 years, had "complained constantly about not getting the medicine [she badly needed]. When the prison officials finally gave her pills after many weeks, they were the wrong ones. "Little wonder then that Everett told a House panel: "My sister should never have died." Kenley was detained after she had returned to the United States from Barbados where she had taken her granddaughter to spend time with relatives. Apparently her name was in a database because she had a few minor drug convictions several years before, which has made her eligible for deportation.

In the years after the conviction, said Everett, "she had turned her life around and had been drug free for three years prior to her death."