Settlement for a Shackled Pregnant Woman

The New York Times ^ | October 17, 2013 | JULIA PRESTON

[moonshinner_09]

A detained Mexican woman who had been shackled to her hospital bed while giving birth in Nashville will receive $490,000 in a settlement and also has the prospect of a resident visa.The monetary settlement, which was approved on Tuesday by the council governing Nashville and Davidson County, Tenn., closes a five-year legal battle that began when the woman, Juana Villegas, was arrested in July 2008 after a traffic stop in a Nashville suburb.

And in an unusual move, a federal judge has urged immigration authorities to give Ms. Villegas a special visa that is generally offered to crime victims. The judge said the visa was in order because of the violation of Ms. Villegas’s civil rights. His finding created a new legal basis for the victims’ visa, said Elliott Ozment, a lawyer who represented Ms. Villegas.

Ms. Villegas, who was nine months pregnant when she was arrested, was in the country illegally. She was detained for six days because of an agreement between Davidson County and federal authorities that gave immigration enforcement powers to sheriffs’ officers.

As a result of that program, jail officers decided to hold her after learning that Ms. Villegas, who has been living in the United States since 1996, had once been deported.

Soon after Ms. Villegas gave birth, she was returned to the jail without her newborn son. A hospital nurse gave her a breast pump, but she was not allowed to take it into the jail and developed a painful breast infection.

In 2011 a federal judge in Tennessee, William J. Haynes Jr., ruled in Ms. Villegas’s favor, finding that jail officers had shown “deliberate indifference” to her medical needs by cuffing her ankle to her hospital bed through most of her labor and during recovery.

[Fire_on_High]

Good! If word gets out that we’re “sadistic” in that we deal with our lawbreakers rather than allowing them to flee and break the law again and again, maybe fewer will flock here to break the bloody law!

[Popman]

Put her arse on a bus (in labor) do that kid is born where it belonged.

You know if the freaking government did their job...in the first place...