Texas Civil Rights Review

Author: mopress

  • Archive: Texas Immigrant Prison for Children Emptied

    Children Removed From Immigrant Shelter

    Friday March 23, 2007 10:31 PM

    By ALICIA A. CALDWELL

    Associated Press Writer

    EL PASO, Texas (AP) – Everyone has been cleared out of a federal shelter for child immigrants amid allegations that a single staff member sexually abused some of the youngsters.
    The employee, who was not identified, was suspended and later fired from his job at the shelter in Nixon, a town of 2,200 people about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio. Federal officials would not discuss how many children were abused or their ages.

    Joshua Trent, associate director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, said officials visited the facility days after learning of the abuse investigation in mid-February.

    The children, who were being held at the Away From Home shelter after trying to cross the border alone, were removed to “err on the side of caution,” Trent said.

    The last child left the shelter March 7.

    It was unclear whether the federal government would cancel its contract with the shelter or whether the shelter would be used again, Trent said. … Full story at Guardian Unlimited

  • Archive: Paris NAACP Presses for Release of Teen

    NAACP reviews Cotton situation
    By Mary Madewell
    The Paris News

    Published March 25, 2007

    The Paris Branch of the NAACP called for a timely release of Shaquanda Cotton from the Texas Youth Commission after a four-hour executive committee meeting Saturday.

    The group also asked that an emergency item be placed on Monday night’s Paris City Council agenda to consider naming a diversity task force.

    The group also called for an expedited appeal of the Cotton case by the Texarkana Court of Appeals in motions approved unanimously by nine board members at Saturday’s meeting.

    Tensions have mounted here in recent days since a Chicago Tribune article appeared March 12 about the Cotton case. … ************

    To some in Paris, sinister past is back

    In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

    By Howard Witt
    Tribune senior correspondent
    Published March 12, 2007

    PARIS, Texas — The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

    There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.

    Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”

    “Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”

    There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.

    There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

    And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

    The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

    Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

    “All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?” said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. “It’s like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated.” …

  • Eye on Williamson: Close Hutto

    We haven’t said enough good stuff about the Eye on Williamson Blog. The progressive Democrat site has editorialized in favor of closing the T. Don Hutto prison for immigrant families, most recently endorsing the conclusion reached by the editorial board at the Houston Chronicle.

    BTW we have an email suggesting that there is a lingering IP issue with folks in Williamson County accessing the Texas Civil Rights Review. Our best diagnosis of the situation is that all the new development there is activating brand new IP ranges. If you know someone in this predicament, please ask them to contact me at gmosesx@prodigy.net so that we can troubleshoot.–gm

  • Where the Chachalacas Screech: Hothouses for Hapless Masses on the Rio Grande

    By Greg Moses

    CounterPunch

    Upon the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge where the chachalacas gather in small groups to screech for dawn, John Neck takes Jay Johnson-Castro for a winding-down ride. The two friends have returned here nightly during their five-day walk against immigrant prisons, because out here where the desert plants drink freely from estuary water, life is in love with itself.
    Even looking at the people out here tending to their backyard citrus groves, you can’t help but breathe a vision of life harmonious and full of grace. True, it’s a different lay of land than what the friends saw recently on the Texas Rolling Plains, but what’s the same is rural people who know the earth well enough to live off her.

    As they crisscross the winding resacas of the Rio Grande Delta on their paths to and from a poisoned sampler of South Texas prisons, Laguna Atascosa always welcomes them back with a grin as if to say, wasn’t that some fukked up bullshit you saw back there, and thanks for being men enough to cry.

    Not that the child prison of Los Fresnos wasn’t grim enough on Wednesday, or that the hidden secrets of Port Isabel didn’t moan underground Thursday from back behind the thicketed gates, but Sunday at Raymondville was a special spike through the heart—a concentration camp of windowless plastic hothouses where a babel of forty or more languages gets melted into one universal cry of injustice.

    On a hot day you can walk into one of those steaming plastic shells and smell nothing but puke as the earth’s most fukked over stomachs do everything possible to disgorge the poisonous foods they have been conned into eating. On a cold day you can do the same thing shivering.

    Once a day at Raymondville, they let the hapless masses out to remind them of sky, and then an hour later they are shoved back in. It gets to be too much. What is there for everyone to do but watch the young man who ties his bed sheet somehow to the ceiling and makes himself a noose. Everyone watches, even the guards, because there is nothing else to do. In the end, they don’t let the man finish his act, but the guards never lift a finger either way.

    For a dedicated attorney such as Jodi Goodwin who walks with Jay and John this Sunday, her willingness to help overflows her ability. For one thing is the sheer number of languages that greet you. Even if you want to help that woman from Ethiopia, it would cost thousands of dollars to hire an interpreter, which is money you don’t have.

    Goodwin remembers a time before blankets at Raymondville–a time before winter coats. Both of these things she demanded for her clients and got. From August through December she even demanded press coverage which is impossible to sue for these days.

    Sunday Goodwin was the walk’s guest of honor. She showed up on time, got a friend to help her park her car at Raymondville, and then returned to talk and walk with Johnson-Castro as loyal cars followed slowly behind. During the final hour, the walk was joined by Dallas supporters Dr. Asma Salam and Jose Delarocha who will host prison vigils in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday. The Dallas vigils will call attention to a forthcoming federal ruling in the matter of habeas corpus for the Hazahza family who were split up between Texas prisons last November and who have yet to be reunited in freedom.

    In a widening circle of conscience that began in Austin last December, the walks of Jay Johnson-Castro and John Neck have exorcised the secrets of five immigrant prisons in Texas: T. Don Hutto, Rolling Plains, International Educational Services, Port Isabel, and Raymondville. In Dallas they will try to pry another family free.

    As for the thousands of nameless immigrants whose pictures we do not have, can it be true that some of them have been rotated from camp to camp for five years or more? Nothing we know tells us to disbelieve the report. The friends of Johnson-Castro have been too reliable for that. But like many Germans in 1945 there will be Americans today who can say we know something’s going on, but never exactly what.

    Simply for the sake of awareness, so that the American people can know what’s going on, “we did really accomplish something here,” said Johnson-Castro to a crowd of a dozen supporters, including television crews from KGBT and Univision. “Look at all this law enforcement,” he said, indicating dozens of people in cars, plain clothes, police uniform, prison guards, and homeland security.

    “The criminals who run this show can say that’s the game, but we can say we are sick and tired of you making these rules,” says Johnson-Castro from his cell phone in the thickets of Laguna Atascosa. Alas, Neck’s truck has run out of gas, so Johnson-Castro sits for a time alone in the truck while Neck takes a quarter-mile trek. The winding-down ride is over.

    “The criminals make the rules,” says Johnson-Castro. “And we’re going to put a stop to that.”

  • A Reader Asks: What's Your Point?

    Dear Greg,

    What is your point? Should this and all nations of the world simply throw open their borders and let total chaos rule? Besides outsourcing and the idiot lifestyle acculturation of the average American today,
    can’t you see that a laissez-faire immigration policy would cause the American middle class to die a quicker death than it is presently dying?
    Can’t you see that multiculturalism is a failed policy encouraging only violence, hate, and social schism? Rather than promoting “diversity”, multiculturalism actually kills world wide diversity by breeding an undefined mass of anational individuals, torn from the nurturing womb of the blood and the soil that was truly theirs in their native lands. And the illusion is that they all come to
    America to be “Americans”. The reality instead is that they all become hyphenated Americans. This country is already turning into a morass of hyphenations – each culture suspicious of the other and virtually
    nonrecognizable vis-a-vis one another.

    Through no desire of my own, I arrived in this country from Southern Europe at four years of age – the worst disaster in my life. Almost immediately, I was accosted by other established “ethnics”, blacks included and often especially, as a spic, a greenhorn, portagee. From my earliest years onward, I had little desire to become part of this supposed deracinated conglomeration of abstract Platonic entities that
    supposedly bear no connection to race, nationality, language, religion, and native culture. And these same sentiments are echoed daily, yearly, and generationally by disturbed deracinated and hence emasculated youth who cry out with guns, knives, and drugs against the absurdity of this supposedly noble “social experiment”.

    If you truly want to help immigrants, you don’t do it by trying to convince America’s native sons that they ought to feel pity upon the disadvantaged dregs of the earth who want to land in America and find their easy place in the sun. You do it by sending them back home, to put their houses in order, to create wealth in their own lands, and to compete effectively, on all levels, with the supposed North American masters of this world.

    Regards….ABrito

    ********************

    Dear ABrito, This morning I went to cash a paycheck. Standing in line, counting fifty people in front of me, then later fifty people behind me, I just don’t know what you mean by an easy place in the sun. Likewise I’m not following what the people around me had to do with the demise of the middle class, except that they didn’t look middle class yet, but would probably achieve it if left alone. As for multiculturalism, I beg to differ, it is one thing that redeems us. Multiculturalism reminds us that no matter how hyphenated a cultural identity may be, it belongs to a human being with human rights. Nevertheless, in consideration of the gap between our assumptions, I do appreciate thoughtful expressions of dissent, and I am happy to post your letter as food for my own thought.–gm

    PS: As for the argument that people should try to live where they can solve their own problems, I think moving to the USA is for many people–such as Mexican corn farmers–exactly the place they need to be voting for more humane trade policies.