Category: Detention

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.

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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.

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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.

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

He was among the first reporters to be notified of the plight of immigrant families at T. Don Hutto prision camp in Taylor, Texas. At last, his editors appear to have given him permission to give the story the coverage it deserves, perhaps because a federal judge last week expressed exasperation in open court. Below are the first few paragraphs of a comprehensive overview posted Sunday morning at statesman.com (subscription).–gm

Familial bonds

Is government’s policy to detain immigrant families fair?

By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 25, 2007

TAYLOR — Conversations with her mother and the son she left behind in Somalia because she feared for her life there. Visits to her grandmother’s tranquil vegetable garden. Walks past her grandparents’ house on her way home; they were always waiting to greet her.

These recurring images filled Bahjo Hosen’s dreams as she slept — with her 2-year-old son, Mustafa, curled up next to her — on a narrow metal bunk bed in a roughly 8-foot-by-12-foot cell with an open toilet and sink in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

On most mornings about 5:30, a guard’s rap on the door jarred Bahjo awake, drawing a dark curtain on her dreams and beginning another day of confinement while she and Mustafa pursued asylum in the U.S. immigration system’s slow-grinding bureaucracy.

“I never dreamed I would be in jail,” said Hosen, who fled a Somalian clan’s death threats, only to be locked up in the immigrant detention center in Taylor.

The former state prison is in the bull’s-eye of a growing controversy over a federal policy that requires families like Bahjo and Mustafa to be confined on immigration violations while they await outcomes of their asylum petitions or deportation. The waits can drag on for days, months, sometimes years.

The controversy raises two questions: Is it inhumane to confine children and families for running afoul of immigration laws? And are there better alternatives than locking people up?

Critics answer yes to both. Lawsuits filed on behalf of 10 children confined in Taylor accuse federal officials of illegally and inhumanely housing children, failing to meet the standards of a 1997 court settlement for the care of minors in immigration custody, and ignoring Congress’ orders to exhaust other options before detaining families — in homelike environments.

At a hearing on the lawsuits last week, even U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks expressed exasperation at the restrictions under which families are living at the Hutto facility.

“This is detention. This isn’t the penitentiary,” Sparks said. Detainees “have less rights than the people I send to the penitentiary.”

Sparks ordered that some restrictions on attorney visits with detainee clients be removed immediately. . . .

The following items were previously posted in the announcements section of the Texas Civil Rights Review.

Wednesday, March 28th, 5pm to 9pm: we will hold a sunset candlelight vigil at the JFK Museum located at Dealey Plaza, 411 Elm Street, Dallas.

Thursday, March 29th, 9:00am to noon: we continue our vigil in solidarity with the Hazahza family and all the imprisoned victims of ICE, at the U.S. District Courthouse, 1100 Commerce Street, Dallas.

Read Jay’s call to action

Mirvat, Ahmed, Muhammad, Juma, and Radi Hazahza
Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims that Hutto was built to keep families together. The Hazahzas have been separated from each other since their pre-election abduction in early November, 2006. Muhammad and Juma were released from the T. Don Hutto prison camp in early February, two days before a press tour there. Hisham (who is not pictured above), Suzi, Mirvat, Ahmed, and Radi are still being held at the Rolling Plains prison camp at Haskell, Texas.

Sample Letter to ICE

Drafted by Joshua Bardavid, Esq.
For three months in a row we have set records for our site traffic in 2007. While the overall totals are surely modest by today’s internet standards, we do want to thank you for showing that you care about the issues we’ve been covering this year. Free Suzi Hazahza and all mistreated immigrants!–gm