Texas Civil Rights Review

Author: mopress

  • NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND…BARS

    Press Release

    FREE the CHILDREN

    People’s Hearing on H.C.R. 64 to end illegal imprisonment of children in Taylor, Texas

    CONTACT:

    Jay J. Johnson Castro Sr.: 830 734 8636 (cell)

    Jane Chamberlain (media): 512 453 5669

    AUSTIN: Save the Children, a coalition of individuals and groups opposing the illegal and immoral detention of immigrant families with children (approximately 400 people from 30 countries) at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, will gather at the Texas Capitol in committee room E2.028 on Saturday, April 28th, 11:00 a.m-4:00pm., for a People’s Hearing on HCR 64. This bill, filed by Reps. Eddie Rodriguez and Rafael Anchia, which condemns as immoral the incarceration of children at Hutto, has been stuck in Chairman David Swinford’s House State Affairs Committee since it was filed in February.
    The people of Texas will hear testimony from citizens across many sectors of society about the abuses of the system of immigrant detention and the improper aggrandizement of private corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America which runs the immigrant prison at Hutto.

    We invite all Texans with an interest in human rights to grab this rare opportunity to think globally and act locally all in one.

    Audiencia popular sobre el proyecto de ley H.C.R 64 para acabar con el encarcelamiento ilegal de menores en Taylor, Texas

    Save the Children, una coalición de interesados opuestos a la detención ilegal e inmoral de familias inmigrantes con hijos (aproximadamente 400 personas procedentes de más de 20 países) en la cárcel T. Don Hutto en Taylor, Tejas, se juntarán en el capitolio de Texas, en el salón de comité E2.028, 11:00am-4:00pm del sábado 28 de abril, para asistir a una Audiencia Popular sobre el proyecto de ley HCR 64. Este proyecto de ley, presentado por los Reps. Eddie Rodríguez y Rafael Anchia, que condena como inmoral la encarcelación de niños en Hutto, ha estado inmovilizado en el Comité de Asuntos Estatales del Presidente David Swinford desde que se presentó en Febrero.

    El pueblo de Texas escuchará el testimonio de representantes de varios sectores de la comunidad en cuanto a los abusos del sistema de detención de inmigrantes, y el engrandecimiento indebido de las corporaciones privadas, así como la Corrections Corporation of America, que tiene a su cargo la administración de la cárcel en Hutto.

    A todos los residentes de Texas interesados en los derechos humanos, les invitamos a aprovechar esta singular oportunidad para pensar a nivel global y expresarse a nivel local.

    Relevant links

    HCR 64 Resolution text:

    Detention and Removal Operations: Alternatives To Detention. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fact Sheet of March 2007.

    Locking up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families. Monograph by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, February 2007

    Corrections Corporation of America: A Critical Look at the First Twenty Years, by Philip Mattera, Mafruza Khan, and Stephen Nathan (May 2003).

    Texas: Tougher than Ever, But Are We Safer? Comparison with New York. Recent legislation contributed to a reduction in NY prison population while allowing the state to spend tax dollars more effectively.

    Neal and Angela Kopit have written a well rounded and persuasive piece on the Taylor Hutto Prison.

  • Jesus Loves the Little Children

    By Jay j. Johnson-Castro

    While driving back to Del Rio from the People’s Hearing at the Texas State Capitol yesterday a song was going through my head…

    Then I decided to answer phone messages from the day. While I was speaking with Dr. Javier Iribarren…recognizing that he was born and raised in Spain…I realized that the tune in my head was probably not known in Spain. I asked him. He said he had never heard it.
    It occurs to me that all over English speaking Anglo North America…there is probably not a human who was raised in this country who doesn’t know this song. I don’t care if one is red or yellow, black or white…we know this song…probably better than we know the National Anthem.

    I just Googled the song…and found that it was written by C.Herbert Woolston (1856-1927). It is based on Matthew 19:14. “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.”

    Few will not know this song by heart…

    Jesus loves the little children,
    All the children of the world.
    Red and yellow, black and white,
    All are precious in His sight,
    Jesus loves the little children of the world.

    I’m 60 years old and find myself totally committed to freeing these little children from a prison camp on American soil…here in Texas. Then this little Sunday School Class tune comes full circle and hits me yesterday. How much more simple can our cause be. To show love to the little children of the world…and to their mothers and fathers who want them to be happy. And yet the cruelty and tyranny of our immoral and criminal leaders would have us believe that Hutto is humane!!!

    After nearly five months of being driven by conviction, truth, honesty and dignity, here we are, a rapidly growing group of Americans…trying to free these precious little children of the world…red and yellow, black and white. Trying to free them from the grips of one of the most evil forces in human history. The grip that has them imprisoned without any freedoms whatsoever comes from the hands of a group of so called evangelicals…who also get money from a racist supremacist micro-minority who are committing this atrocity…using every cruel weapon in their arsenal…for money.

    According to the dictionary, “evangel” means “good news”. Correspondingly, “evangelical” is “a designation for Christians who hold to basic conservative interpretations of the Bible…and the proclamation of the “evangel” or “good news” of salvation through Christ.”

    Interestingly, at the Capitol yesterday, many were commenting on the gross absence of the faith based organizations when it comes to the cruel, inhumane, immoral and criminal detention of these little children…of the world…right here in Texas, 35 miles northeast of the Capitol building. Excuse my profanity…but where the hell are these well salaried spiritual leaders?

    The answer is ever so simple. Dr. Javier Iribarren gave me a wristband on our walk to hold a vigil in Governor’s Perry’s hometown of Haskell, Texas, where Suzi Hazahza and here family are still incarcerated in a prison camp for wanting to be Americans. The wristband is wrapped on my rear-view mirror. Silence is Complicity. The churches KNOW about the imprisonment of the innocent and precious “little children of the world”…especially those in Taylor and Williamson County. So…after all of their silence…what could/would/should any one of us conclude? One would do well to ask…”Do they still teach the Sunday School classes C. Herbet Woolston’s little song…’Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World”?

    Fortunately, religious bigotry has not corrupted the hearts of all Taylor and Williamson County residents. Many were at the Capitol building yesterday…strategizing on how to get the political leaders of the Texas Legislature, who like us also grew up with Woolston’s song burned in their minds, to obey their consciences instead of their political party…and support the freeing of “the little children of the world” who are imprisoned “for profit” by the White House, Chertoff and ICE at the CCA prison camp.

    After all is said and done…I just got this link from Trish Taylor…who was also with us at the Capitol yesterday…committed to freeing the children.

    Moral leadership?! How degradant can “Christianity” and their leaders become in America …before the flocks rise up in outrage? Weren’t the religious leaders and their flocks in Germany complicit with the fascism of that era?

    Jay
    “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BARS”
    Free the Children
    jay@villadelrio.com.

  • While Jay Walks to the Children of Hutto, Texas Walks Away

    Email from Jay J. Johnson-Castro.

    On April 13th we held the press conference at the Capitol…and did the first day of Hutto Walk II…to protest ICE and CCA’s imprisonment of innocent children in Taylor, TX. Not until today did I learn that Michele Adams, Policy Specialist for the Texas Department of Family and Child Protective Services EXEMPTED CCA and Hutto from the laws that protect families and children in Texas.

    But…thanks to a young journalist of the San Antonio Current…we now know. He shared the attached with me…as I now share them with you.

    As we endeavor to get the House Committee of State Affairs to allow a public hearing on HCR 64…it becomes even more sinister how corrupted this system is in protecting the immoral and criminal treatment of the children and their mothers from some 30 countries at the Hutto prison camp.

    Anyone who is remotely aware of how Hutto was prior to the Hutto Walk and Vigil in December, prior to the suit by the Texas Civil Rights Project, prior to the ACLU law suits, prior to the Women’s Commission’s condemnation of Hutto, prior to the editorial boards of the Austin American-Statesman and the Houston Chronicle…compare the attached letters. You’ll see flagrant and willful dishonesty. But…at least we have it in writing. And we have a copy of the DFPS in writing…just two weeks old.

    It is gut wrenching when one thinks of the Ibrahim family and the fact that the children had no access to their pregnant mother at night. I suspect that when some of you sift through this…there will be an outrages so hot that the Lege will feel the heat of spontaneous combustion.

    Is it yet time for an investigation by the Texas Attorney General, the Texas Rangers? How about the FBI? Who has the courage and the moral fiber to stand up to this immoral activity?

    I know some of you will know exactly what to do and with whom to share this information. I, for one, have said all along that anyone who is complicit with the imprisonment of these little children…should be indicted and serve in one of those cells in Hutto.

    Jay
    “No Child Left Behind Bars”
    FREE the CHILDREN
    jay@villadelrio.com
    (830)768-0768

  • Raymondville Greets Amy Goodman at Gunpoint

    By Nick Braune

    Here is a small incident, but another sign of the militarization of the border. Last Monday, April 23, Amy Goodman, a nationally respected reporter (“Democracy Now”), made a fast stop at South Texas College for a presentation on the media. Having a bit of time before flying out, she asked if she could be driven over to Raymondville to get some pictures of the immigration detention tents she had heard about. She was not planning anything public or planning on going in for interviews, or anything like that. But apparently, the car she was in got too close to the tents and she and the other passengers in a car were met by a man in a CCA (Corrections Corporation of America ) uniform holding a rifle (shotgun?) at their car and yelling at them. Jennifer Clark, who is a political science instructor and a leader in the Women’s Studies Committee at South Texas College , was driving the car.

    Author: Jenny. Please tell me what happened at the fascistic Raymondville Detention Center last Monday. Did they know it was Amy Goodman?

    Clark : I don’t think they knew it was her, I was driving in my car: Amy and I were in the front and John Jones [a progressive political scientist who runs Virtual Citizens, an internet newsletter] and Denis Moynihan (Amy’s outreach coordinator) were in the back. The guard in the truck came from nowhere and drove at us fast, stopping an inch or so from my car totally cutting me off from moving any further. He said that he thought we were “escaping” from the facility which did not make sense as we were driving towards not away. He literally escorted us off the premises with his gun pointed at us the whole time. There was no warning at all. When we got to the front gate a Raymondville police car had arrived. He accused us of trespassing and asked if we had not read the sign. We had not read seen the sign as we had approached the side of the facility.

    **********

    From Democracy Now! transcript, April 27, 2007.

    AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, I went down to Raymondville, Texas, to this vast tent detention camp right behind a prison. As soon as we got there, we were met by the security, and they cocked their guns at us, one of the men in the pickup truck saying we got to get off the property now. We reported on the Jonathan Hutto facility, where kids are held, hundreds of kids — the ACLU is suing now — and talked to a nine-year-old boy named Kevin, who said, “I just want to go home. I just want to be free.” What about these prisons?

    DAVID BACON: Well, the Bush administration is privatizing the enforcement of immigration law. They’re building huge detention facilities, which are run by private corporations, like Halliburton, for instance. Halliburton has started to build these. And this is part of the increased enforcement program that the Bush administration has. This is sort of like the flipside of the guestworker programs, to say — you know, to try and negotiate or to establish new guestworker programs to bring people to the US as contract workers, and for anybody who’s not part of that program, to begin to arrest people, detain people, as we’re seeing in these raids, put them into these kinds of — you know, I would say they’re close to concentration camps, really, but that are also sort of private business giveaways to Bush cronies.

  • Primero de Mayo: No Wars, No Walls

    By Nick Braune
    Mid-Valley Town Crier
    Posted with permission of author

    May 1st is coming up, and I am ready for the Immigrant Rights March (National Mobilization to Support Immigrant Workers) with farm workers and service employees and progressive students and church people and others. The march will be loud but will also be, I hope, the beginning of a new deliberative process about ongoing immigration — a deliberative process as opposed to hysterical radio talk-show rants about “us versus them.”
    Marches are necessary for someone like me — I am a pacer by nature, as my students will attest — and have felt cramped up and frightened by the shrill radio sounds in our country. I need to walk outside, hear people yelling for “justicia” and immigration reform and not vindictiveness. On May 1st, starting at 6:00 P.M. in McAllen , at Municipal Park (Bicentennial and Pecan), I will carry a sign and know that all over the country people are walking for justice. I will feel part of a better, more deliberative nation emerging.

    I have mulled over what sign to carry. I could make my own: “International Labor Rights,” “NAFTA is the Problem, not Immigrants,” “Stop the Militarization of the Border– it’s scaring me,” or “Let America be a Nation of Immigrants.” Or maybe I will simply carry one end of the People for Peace and Justice banner, like last year. Or maybe I’ll just proudly carry a Farm Worker (UFW and LUPE) flag — they often hand them out.

    (Although I wouldn’t make such a wordy protest sign, I can also picture myself carrying this one: “Shut down the Ugly Raymondville Immigration Detention Center and the Other Private, For-profit, Detention Centers in Texas .” But it’s not very catchy and uses too much marker ink.)

    My latest sign idea is a simple one, “No War and No Wall.” We have been treated, during the Bush regime, to shrill knee-jerk calls for support of the Iraq War and for support of a militarized border wall facing Mexico . I think they’re connected. America has had a “preemptive” (non-collaborative) policy of war and wall, a punitive policy of war and wall, and a paranoid policy. (The world out there is hostile and coming our way, we’ve been told by Bush and Fox News.)

    Consider this. When I protested the Raymondville immigration detention facility a few weeks ago, which I reported in this column, I was startled by the surreal concentration camp look to the place: barbed wire and brown balloon tents, with white vans in front labeled “Homeland Security.” I was suspicious back when Bush first proposed that “Homeland” term for his giant spy and enforcement agency, because the name sounded like it would appeal to the neurotic Aryans of Weimar Germany. I remember wondering what it would morph into. And there it was, in Raymondville.

    I think my sign “No War and No Wall” is perfect for the immigration march. Just as the War has been a disaster, so will Bush’s militarized, paranoid immigration policies bring chaos.

    Concerning the war disaster, last week I attended the presentation of a world renowned woman activist, Yanar Mohammed from Iraq , who spoke at South Texas College . She has set up a series of shelters in Iraq , shelters protecting women in the disintegrating society. Iraq is now a disaster zone and getting worse, with run-amuck militias and revenge killings.

    She recently wrote, “It is heartbreaking to me to see the return of extreme anti-woman practices that we had not seen for many decades. When I grew up in Iraq , women went to school. Educated professional working women [She herself has two degrees in architecture] were a part of our society. Today, a woman risks her life simply by going to the grocery store.”

    Violence against women has reached epidemic proportions with the Islamist militias, the sectarian violence (stirred up by vacillating US policies) and the economic disruption. She has helped form a veritable “underground railroad’ to help protect vulnerable and targeted women in Iraq .

    McAllen ’s Monitor reported her speech: “Some of the women her organization helps have been raped by Iraqi and American soldiers, Mohammed said. Other women have been kidnapped and made to live their lives in brothels. Mohammed told of a 14- year-old girl who was kidnapped, taken to a brothel and escaped before being found by organization advocates.”

    There is so much chaos in Iraq , with over a million displaced people and with two million previously productive Iraqis having fled the country, that there are 30 women executed monthly in Iraq by militias, some by “honor” killings and sectarian revenge.

    War ravaged Iraq is the image my sign will raise at the immigration march. We need national deliberation on immigration, not Bush’s walls, zones, and militarized chaos.