Nina Bernstein of the New York Times offers "Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo" (link). While much of the NYT's immigration coverage verges on the manic, in this case the mentally ill person is an illegal alien from China who's caught in a Kafkaesque maze of rules and regulations.

It's certainly a tragic story and one that might be fixed by relatively minor changes in the law. However, that's not the NYT's point: their goal with articles like this is to discourage overall enforcement of our immigration laws, in this instance using an relatively rare edge case.

UPDATE: Michael Tan of the American Civil Liberties Union discusses the article and lists that Mexican government-linked group's demands at blog.aclu.org/2009/05/04/mentally-disabled-immigrants-deserve-due-process