mentally ill and stuck in immigration limbo

This story is a couple of weeks old, but it's worth bringing up because it's just so damn sad... 35-year-old Xiu Ping Jiang, a mentally ill Chinese immigrant, has been stuck for over a year in the solitary hell of deportation limbo -- suicidal, emaciated and deprived of proper medical treatment or representation: Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo.

Her bleak experience in the immigration system has only come to light because of a fluke -- she happens to have the same name as the ex-wife of Jiverly Wong, the gunman who fatally shot 13 people in April at an immigration services center in Binghamton. Not the same person, but as reporters tried to find the ex-wife, her court records came up.

The situation illustrates the vulnerability of the mentally ill in the immigration system. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps putting increasingly strict enforcement measures in place, more and more people with mental illness are being put into detention -- and no one is really looking out for them.

There are currently no rules for determining competency in deportation proceedings, and no way to ensure representation for a mentally ill person facing deportation. So what happens in the case of someone like Ms. Jiang? Too often, people in the system just disappear.