NEW YORK (WPIX)—
It's a division of Homeland Security known as " ICE," which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In recent weeks, ICE agents have busted alleged sexual predators living in the city illegally and rescued a victim of human trafficking in Brooklyn.However, Queens immigration attorney Jean Wang say ICE went way overboard, when the agency deported her client, 47-year-old Gian Ding of China.
"ICE used to inject people with tranquilizers, so they wouldn't fight as they're being removed to the airport," Wang told PIX News.
Video from Chinese TV shows a man, claiming to be Gian Ding, wandering aimlessly in the Beijing airport on Oct.17 wearing an orange top and carrying a plastic bag.
The video shows airport officials giving Ding noodles to eat, checking out the contents of a manila envelope and making note of scabs on Ding's hands. Ding admits he bit himself, when ICE agents tried to remove him several times this year from the "Federal Detention Center" on Varick street in downtown Manhattan. However, Ding claims photos he sent from China of other injuries, to his legs and arms, were inflicted during 14 months of detention at the Varick street facility. He spoke to PIX News - in halting English - by phone, from China.
"They threw me down! Guards, they searched me," Ding said. "They searched me without my underwear."
Ding's lawyer claims one incident happened in front of female detainees.
"It was embarrassing. He's a male...and to have all that revealed in front of women...is very embarrassing," said Wang.
Ding told PIX News the officers executed their forceful search when he refused to sign documents.
Ding - who says he was an importer/exporter living in Flushing - told lawyers his wife and child are U.S. citizens. When PIX News reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Agent Lou Martinez, the spokesman for ICE in New York, gave us a statement approved by ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C.
"The allegations brought to our attention surrounding the case of Mr. Ding are currently being evaluated by the Office of Professional Responsibility," said Martinez. "ICE's priority is to ensure the safe and humane detention, and removal, of those individuals in its care and custody."
In fiscal year 2009, the New York ICE office removed 2,247 aliens from the Metro area. Deportation officers often do escorts out of Kennedy Airport, on commercial flights.
Last year, in 2008, the director of the ICE office of Detention and Removal Operations in Washington issued a memo, saying: "Immigration officers would need a court order before any involuntary sedation could be used, during deportation."
The order says there are no exceptions to this policy. To get a court order, the government "will offer evidence that the alien has a history of exercising physical resistance to being removed."
Sources tell PIX News Ding did resist deportation four different times and was even taken off a plane once.
Ding claims officials forced him to ingest two sleeping pills against his will.
In addition, Ding says he was deported without any travel documents and the Beijing TV video shows customs officials in China creating some, so Ding could catch another flight to Shanghai, much closer to his home in Fujian Province. The Chinese video shows him bowing with gratitude to Beijing customs officials.
"I want the truth to come out," said Ding.
