Hoisting the image of a Chinese immigrant who miscarried twins while awaiting deportation, local elected officials and community leaders yesterday demanded “accountability” from federal immigration officials.

They said maltreatment of immigrants in the deportation system extends far beyond the woman’s case, which allegedly included her being pushed against a van, forced to leave for a plane to China without informing her young children – who are American citizens – and being denied medical treatment.

“Everyone should know this is not an isolated incident,” Jimmy Yan, the general counsel to the president of Manhattan, Scott Stringer, said. Mr. Yan, who until recently was counsel to the Mayor’s Office on Immigrant Affairs of New York, cited the case as part of a pattern of the federal government treating people inhumanely.

The Chinese immigrant who miscarried, Zhenxing Jiang, 32, was removed from a Philadelphia office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during what she thought was a routine appointment on February 7, City Council Member John Liu said yesterday. While her two young sons and husband waited for her to finish her appointment, he said she was whisked in a van and taken to New York to board a flight to China.

ICE said in a statement yesterday that it is referring the case to its Office of Professional Responsibility, but it denied any wrongdoing. Since 2002, Ms. Jiang has been under removal proceedings, having entered the country illegally, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ernestine Fobbs, said.

Last week, after learning that Ms. Jiang was pregnant, “ICE officials took special care in handling her and facilitating her transportation from Philadelphia to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport,” the agency, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. When Ms. Jiang, immediately before boarding the flight to China, said she “needed to use the restroom one last time,” immigration officers complied. When she complained of stomach pains, Ms. Fobbs said they immediately contacted an ambulance. Ms. Jiang has since been reunited with her family while she recovers.

While Ms. Fobbs said she understood that most immigrants being deported have reason not to like ICE, she denied any misconduct on the part of the agency. “When you’re being removed from the United States, sometimes people are not very happy about the process,” Ms. Fobbs said. Ultimately, she said, “We are carrying out an order.”

Those who work with immigrants facing immigration detention and deportation, however, not only demanded “accountability” for Ms. Jiang’s case but said it indicated a much wider problem. “In the Haitian-American community, stories like Ms. Jiang’s are very common to us,” the development specialist at the organization Haitian-Americans United for Progress, Erin Toussaint, said. “We are not a Third World country, we are an industrialized nation where everyone should have access to health care.”

Subhash Kateel, a director of Families for Freedom, a Brooklyn-based advocacy group that has collected the testimony of nearly 1,000 individuals in immigration detention, said a lack of adequate health care, and in some cases egregious abuses, are the rule rather than the exception in his experience.

“It’s what you do when you really want someone to leave the country,” he said.