We’re excited to announce that the Business of Detention project has been selected as a 2009 Finalist in the “Student” category at the South by Southwest Interactive Web Awards. The site will also compete for a People’s Choice Award (the online public’s favorite finalist). Winners are announced March 15, 2009.

The Business of Detention project was created by reporters Renee Feltz (’08) and Stokely Baksh (’08), while graduate students at Columbia University’s Graduate of Journalism. Our desire was to create an innovative way to present the business of privatized immigration detention management — using solid reporting skills and pairing that up with video and interactive info graphics. This was also an experiment for us in creating a platform for a news product, that largely went under reported in mainstream news when we started the Corrections Corporation of American investigative project in late 2007. That project became the first investigative-new media project for the University and has since won the Melvin Mencher Award for Superior Reporting and James A. Wechsler Award for National Reporting.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Please visit http://sxsw.com/peoples-choice to vote us for the People’s Choice Award. You can vote once a day until the contest ends!

Pass this along and tell your friends, family, and students. We hope to get the word out to as many people as possible! Thanks.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008: Earlier this month, a thirty-four-year-old Chinese computer engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, who overstayed his visa, died in a Rhode Island immigration detention center. He had cancer in his liver, lung and bones, and a fractured spine. Despite repeated complaints of severe pain, Mr. Ng was refused independent medical evaluation by immigration officials. Before Mr. Ng died on August 6th, he told his sister that the nurses at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island had told him to “stop faking” his illness. We speak to immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Renee Feltz, co-creator of the site BusinessOfDetention.com.

We turn now to the sprawling detention system within this country that some have likened to a gulag and a series of domestic Guantanamo Bays: The immigration prisons that over 300,000 people pass through each year.

Earlier this month a 34-year old Chinese computer engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, who overstayed his visa died in a Rhode Island immigration detention center. He had cancer in his liver, lung, and bones, and a fractured spine.

Despite repeated complaints of severe pain Mr. Ng was refused independent medical evaluation by immigration officials, the New York Times reported. Instead he was taken in shackles to another prison two hours away where an immigration officer tried to convince him to withdraw his appeals and accept deportation.

Before Mr. Ng died on August 6th he told his sister that the nurses at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island had told him to “stop faking” his illness.

Mr. Ng’s story is the latest in a series of similar cases of neglect and abuse at the hands of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or ICE.

Investigations by the Washington Post and New York Times earlier this year revealed that as many as 83 detainees have died in or soon after ICE custody in the five years since the agency was created in March of 2003.

When contacted for response ICE said they could not comment on Mr. Ng’s death because it is under investigation.

Congress is responding to these deaths with legislation aimed to improve conditions for non-citizens in ICE custody. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren from California and Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey sponsored the House and Senate versions of the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008.

Joshua Bardavid, immigration attorney in New York. He is representing Hiu Lui Ng’s family.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Democratic Congress member from California. She serves as Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law.

Renee Feltz, investigative journalist based in New York City and creator with Stokely Baksh of the award-winning multimedia investigative project BusinessOfDetention.com. Part of this project featured on MotherJones.com, and another part will be featured in an upcoming issue of NACLA.

For video and audio, go to http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/19/35_year_old_immigrant_detainee_dies