A lawsuit filed in federal court a year ago by a Dominican detainee makes complaints about health care at a detention center in Rhode Island that are similar to accounts of how the center treated a Chinese New Yorker who died Aug. 6 in immigration custody. That inmate was suffering from a fractured spine and extensive cancer that had gone undiagnosed until five days before his death.

The lawsuit, filed in Providence, asserts that employees at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center, in Central Falls, R.I., denied a wheelchair to Marino De Los Santos, who said that he suffered serious injuries to his neck, back, chest and spine in two falls at the center in 2006. According to the suit, employees accused Mr. De Los Santos of faking his injuries and refused to take him to scheduled examinations by a spine specialist.

Cornell Corrections of Rhode Island, one of the defendants, which ran the center at the time covered by the suit, denied any wrongdoing in its answer.

In the case of Hiu Lui Ng, who was the subject of an article last week in The New York Times, lawyers and relatives said that when he was racked with pain and too weak to walk, detention officials refused him a wheelchair, failed to take him to scheduled appointments for an M.R.I. exam or a CT scan, and instead took him in shackles to Hartford  where he was pressured to withdraw his appeals and accept deportation.