Category: Detention

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.

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Two important demonstrations took place last weekend, one nearby, in Raymondville
outside their immigration detention center, and one up in Taylor, Texas near
Austin, where the infamous T. Don Hutto detention center is located.

***

At the Raymondville detention center, there were 75 protesters, and they received very good TV coverage on one Valley-wide TV station and adequate coverage in the Harlingen daily paper. Univision was there, and perhaps more media. The demonstration was important because it publicly linked several Valley organizations on this issue.

Some endorsers that were listed on a leaflet: People for Peace and Justice, MEChA, Pax Christi, Student Farmworker Alliance, La Uni*n Del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), Border Ambassadors, a Mennonite community in San Juan and another in Brownsville, the “base community” of San Felipe de Jesus Catholic Church in Brownsville, Proyecto Libertad, UTPA Environmental Awareness Club, Veterans for Peace, Foro Socialista del Valle, El Tribuno, and Christian Peacemakers. For sure, this is not everyone in the Valley, but it is a big enough coalition to begin reaching everyone if the Raymondville Center is not shut down soon.

It was a lively demonstration with speakers denouncing the for-profit complex — it treats the immigrants, who have not been convicted of a crime, as convicted criminals. According to one speaker, because two thousand people are held behind razor wire in those big puffy tents, Raymondville can boast of having America’s largest concentration camp.

At one point demonstrators heard there were detainees in a corner exercise yard, so they took the bullhorns and walked down the road about a thousand feet. They called out and could see heads bobbing up as some prisoners leaped up to peak over the six foot wall and rolled wire.

***

The other demonstration was in Taylor, Texas at the Hutto detention center, which is particularly odious because it holds children. There were 500 protestors. I interviewed Sarnata Reynolds, the national immigration rights director of Amnesty International in Washington, DC, who attended the vigil.

Author: What primary commitment or concern led your group to support this demonstration?

Reynolds: Amnesty International USA is very concerned about the detention of children, asylum seekers, and migrants in prison-like facilities. It is hard to imagine a time that it might be appropriate to dress children in prison gear, deny them access to adequate schooling and recreation, or threaten that they’ll be separated from their parents if they don’t behave, but these are exactly the reports coming out of Hutto.

If a broad spectrum of United States citizens were aware that children are being incarcerated for months and years at a time, the outcry would be even larger. We hope that this World Refugee Day event educates more people about the U.S. policy of detaining children, and spurs on a growing movement against this practice in Texas.

Author: Thank you for your work.

Also in the crowd at Hutto was the director of District 7 LULAC, Rita Gonzales-Garza. I asked for a quick interview.

Author: What concern or commitment brought you here?

Gonzales-Garza: I was drawn to this Hutto vigil, first, because of my extreme disgust with our federal government’s practice, especially under the current administration, of imprisoning persons who are seeking asylum or who are here to search for a better life for their family.

Secondly, this practice has become a multi-million-, if not billion-, dollar industry. Prior to this administration, certain immigrants and most asylum seekers who were apprehended were not imprisoned; they were required to register with the U.S. government and provide information on their residence and information on other persons who would know their residence. They could stay in this country until their immigration hearing took place and the outcome was determined. Now they are imprisoned, for profit.

This detention/prison center in Taylor is a horrendous violation of human rights because here it jails women and their children. How can a government that used to be a “beacon of justice” do such a thing? It is all about the mighty dollar and putting that dollar in the hands of friends and supporters of the administration. Even Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, with whom Vice President Cheney is associated, has gotten into the business of building private prisons for immigrants and asylum seekers.

Author: And the companies operating the prisons get paid $3,000 a month — and I’ve heard way higher figures — per detainee.

Gonzales-Garza: Yes. It’s a multi-million dollar, perhaps billion dollar, industry now. All in the name of “securing our borders from terrorists.” What a sham!

Author: Any new plans?

Gonzales-Garza: Yes, we are beginning a campaign to educate Congress about this issue and to press this issue with presidential candidates.

Author: Good. Thank you.

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.

The TUFF Coalition has a new website with a focus on the campaign to close the T. Don Hutto prison for immigrant children — a campaign they started in Dec. 2006:

www.texansunited4families.com

UNITED NATIONS

Press Release

SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON HUMAN
RIGHTS OF MIGRANTS ENDS VISIT
TO THE UNITED STATES

17 May 2007: The Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Jorge Bustamante, issued the following statement today:

The Special Rapporteur wishes to thank the Government of the United States of America for their official invitation to visit their country and their cooperation during his 18 day visit to the United States from 30 April to 17 May 2007. In the course of his visit, the Special Rapporteur met with senior government officials in charge of migration and human rights issues at the federal level.

While in the country, the Special Rapporteur traveled to the border areas in California and Arizona, witnessing firsthand the operations of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He also met with migrants in South Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, New York and Washington DC and had the opportunity to speak with and hear from representatives of the civil society working on the human rights of migrants at the local, state, regional, and national level.

The Special Rapporteur had the opportunity to visit the Florence Detention Center in Florence, Arizona, taking note of the conditions of migrant detainees in that facility.

He was disappointed, however, that his scheduled and approved visits to the Hutto Detention Center in Texas and the Monmouth Detention Center in New Jersey were cancelled with no explanation.

His visit has shed light on a range of concerns regarding the rights of migrants, including arbitrary detention; separation of families; substandard conditions of detention; procedural violations in criminal and administrative law proceedings, racial and ethnic discrimination; arbitrary and collective expulsions and violations of children’s and women’s rights.

The Special Rapporteur especially noted his concern that there is no centralized system in the United States to obtain information regarding those arrested by immigration officials or where individuals are detained. Families may spend prolonged periods without information as to the whereabouts of detained relatives. Transfers of individuals in custody also may occur without notice to families or attorneys and may result in detention in remote locations, far from families and access to legal support.

Mandatory detention of individuals who are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community causes family separation and economic, emotional, psychological hardship for family members, particularly children.

The Special Rapporteur further noted that accompanied and unaccompanied children are temporarily detained in adult detention facilities which do not adequately protect the rights of child migrants.

The Special Rapporteur noted that migrants undergoing removal proceedings do not have the right to appointed legal Counsel and must therefore represent themselves in complex legal proceedings.

The Special Rapporteur also had the opportunity to hear the testimonies of many migrant workers affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, including guest workers and migrant workers. Human rights issues raised with the Special Rapporteur included the lack of adequate housing available to migrant workers, inhuman and degrading treatment of workers, disparate treatment of workers based on ethnic or national origin, coerced labor and the lack of a fair living wage for all workers. Of particular concern are migrant workers who were being exploited by subcontractors of US government offices in charge of cleaning and repairing tasks. These US government offices ignore labor grievances about violations of migrants? labor rights including wage theft, and they deny their responsibility and pass it on to the subcontractors.

The Special Rapporteur encourages the United States Government:

– to ensure that domestic laws and immigration enforcement activities are consistent with its international obligations to protect the rights of migrant workers within the context of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention Against Torture and All Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CAT), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

– The Special Rapporteur encourages the United States Government to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families

The Special Rapporteur calls upon the U.S. authorities to promote and enforce national policies and practices that protect human rights and public welfare of migrants. He noted that an over-reliance on, and delegation of authority to local level law enforcement may compromise the ability of the U.S. government to effectively address issues affecting migrants, and to comply with its human rights obligations under International Law.

The Special Rapporteur will provide the results of his fact finding mission and his recommendations in his report to the Human Rights Council.

Professor Jorge Bustamante was appointed Special Rapporteur in August 2005. The mandate on the human rights of migrants was established in 1999 to examine ways and means to overcome the obstacles existing to the full and effective protection of the human rights of migrants, including obstacles and difficulties for the return of migrants who are undocumented or in an irregular situation.