How Is This Necessary?

Awful. Simply awful.

The treatment of a pregnant Chinese woman who miscarried twins last week after federal immigration officers in Philadelphia forcibly tried to deport her from New York has become a flash point for planned protest in the Chinese-American communities of both cities, lawyers and immigrant advocates said yesterday....

By the time they reached the airport, Ms. Jiang was suffering severe abdominal cramps and begging for help in a public waiting area, said John C. Liu, a New York city council member, who called the woman's treatment un-American. Someone called an ambulance, Mr. Liu said, and she was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where Mr. Liu visited her after doctors found that the two fetuses she was carrying had died....

Ms. Jiang had been allowed to report routinely for years to an immigration office in Philadelphia until last Tuesday, he added.

Ms. Jiang and many of the family's Chinese supporters say the authorities decided to deport her when they learned she was pregnant, to prevent her from giving birth to another United States citizen.