Hopper
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Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 7:23 pm
By Jennifer Stewart, Halifax Chronicle Herald
A Nova Scotia doctor now living in the United States claims he was brutally sodomized by guards at a California detention centre where he was held under suspicion of car theft.
Ricky Chadda, 34, said this is just one of many atrocities he's endured as a result of a four-year-old case of mistaken identity.
He said it's gotten so bad that he won't even leave the country to visit his mother in Halifax for fear of his life.
Mr. Chadda, who moved to Los Angeles in 1996, said he's tired of covering up the threats directed at him by San Diego officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, formerly known as the INS.
"I'm tired and emotionally and physically drained from having this kind of lifestyle," Mr. Chadda said from his Los Angeles home last week.
"I have not lived for the past 15 months."
Mr. Chadda, who's of East Indian descent, previously chose not to speak to reporters about his detentions in 2001 and 2002 for fear of worsening an already bad rapport with federal officials.
Both his mother and lawyer spoke on his behalf.
He said he's only come forward now - against his new lawyer's advice - because he's "sick and tired" of living in fear.
"There were certain things left out before that need to be told," he said.
Mr. Chadda first learned of the fingerprint mix-up that linked him to a suspected car thief when he appeared in court for an impaired-driving charge in 2000.
He kept the court records that cleared him of any connection, which proved to come in handy a year later.
In October 2001 at Toronto's Pearson Airport, he was again mistaken for the suspected thief and held for eight hours. He was later released and ordered to show up at the San Diego immigration office two weeks later.
There Mr. Chadda showed them the court papers and was quickly dismissed - without an apology.
"They admitted it was a clerical error and that was it," the distraught doctor said.
"Had I not shown up, they would have confiscated my passport, green card - they would have arrested me."
The court papers didn't suffice a second time when he tried to enter the United States from the same airport on Oct. 24, 2002.
"I said, 'This is like deja vu, haven't we already been through this?' "
The border guards took his green card and allowed him to continue on to California on the condition he check in with the same immigration office.
Mr. Chadda and his mother, who was visiting, showed up for what they thought would be a routine visit on Nov. 12. Instead, he said federal officials handcuffed and shackled him, and placed a gun to his left temple.
"I'll never forget the feeling of the barrel of that pistol on my head," he said quietly.
"That coffee just dropped out of my hand, (my mother) dropped her muffin. It was like something out of a movie."
Mr. Chadda said he was bused to a detention centre about five kilometres from the Mexican border, where he spent the next 12 hours in a holding cell with about 15 other prisoners.
He described his surroundings as "worse than a gutter" he'd seen in India.
"Everyone's using the same toilet and there's no running water, no soap. There's dust, cockroaches on the floor, urine on the floor . . . I was shocked."
The young doctor said he suffered both verbal and sexual abuse at the hands of the guards, who sodomized him with the handle of a plunger while taunting him racially.
"They kept calling me Pretty Boy Doc," Mr. Chadda said.
"I realized after that, I'd better keep my mouth shut."
The Halifax native spent the next five days at the detention centre, during which he said he was nearly assaulted a second time.
A guard took him outside on his last night to have a cigarette. The man then tried to rape him, he said, but he fought back.
He said he also regularly witnessed drug deals between prisoners and the guards. "There were drugs, you name it, you could get it . . . What were they selling them for? Sexual favours and cash."
When Mr. Chadda was finally cleared and released on Nov. 18, he said he was sent off in an unforgettable manner.
"He showed me a list of names of my friends and family, their phone numbers, addresses," he said of a senior INS official.
The official told him that if he went public with what had happened in the detention centre, " 'We will make your life a living hell,' " Mr. Chadda said.
Representatives from the FBI and the former INS could not be reached for comment last week.
