Category: Detention

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro.

After the Hutto Walk II and the Hutto Vigil VII this past weekend…I’ve had a chance to sift through all the results and realities. Great people supported the walk and the vigil. Great people showed up. Great minds are determined to forge ahead to Free the Children.

Are we ready to take it to the next level in order to FREE the CHILDREN? If so…please mark your calendars for Saturday, April 28th, 11:00am-4:00pm. Texas State Capitol…Austin.
Let’s start by saying first…that we now have registered FreeTheChildren.info. With that name, our mission is defined. We intend to start a state, national and international campaign to free the thousands of children from cruel and inhumane, yes illegal incarceration…starting with the ugly reality that we have hundreds on innocent little ones in concentration camps… right here in Texas. There are children from some 30 countries in Hutto…who are denied all the freedoms that America promises.

Second reality is that some within our government…local, state and national…are callous enough to not only permit the imprisonment of babies…some actually derive financial and political benefits for their complicity in this crime…which up until now is being committed with impunity. That too will change.

Dedicated people are battling all kinds of sick and warped things going on in the world around us as well as in our own country. We are constantly forced to prioritize which battles we choose to fight…no? But…how much more sinister and demented…and how much more worthy a cause do we need…then the reality that precious little children are being cruelly imprisoned….and for-profit…on the pretext of national security? How much more cruel can the Administration, Chertoff and ICE be than to abuse these babies.

How much more repugnant does the federal government have to be…before the sane people of this country, who still have a conscience, rise up and say that we’ve had enough of this tyranny. Babies, children in their formative years, elementary aged children, school age children…should not be in concentration camps…let alone for profit. A concentration camp with a swing set…is still a concentration camp!

We now know that Rep. Eddie Rodriquez and Rep. Rafael Anchia are trying to champion the freeing of these little ones. They have authored HCR 64…essentially condemning the immoral incarceration of children at Hutto. Yet, the Chair of the State Affairs Committee, David Swinford, has blocked the progress of that bill. He has refused up until now…to allow we the public to address the Hutto concentration camp before the State Affairs committee in a public hearing…thereby disenfranchising democracy and the voice of “We the people”. And…only two weeks remain for committee hearings.

Since Swinford is willing to prevent we the people from expressing our views…”We the people” will therefore hold our own public hearing in the Capitol. A “We the public” Hearing. In one week…Saturday, April 28th we will meet in Committee Room: E2.028 The room is reserved from 11:00am-4:00pm. This is an opportunity for any one who has that inner conviction that the innocent children in Hutto should be freed…along with their mothers…to publicly voice their hearts and minds.

If you’re sincere about freeing the children…make this sacrifice. Join us at the capitol…to Free the Children. You don’t have to stay the whole time. But do…join us to Free the Children who are being immorally and illegally imprisoned in Hutto.

View the resolution that was introduced by Rep. Eddie Rodriquez to free the children in Hutto.

So amigos. Let’s make a difference. Please forward this to your friends and organizations…and the media contacts that you have. Let’s Free the Children!!!

Let’s remember…

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people” Martin Luther King, Jr.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Capitol this coming Saturday…the 28th…

Jay
(830)768-0768

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro

Afternoon Freedom Ambassadors…

When Hutto Vigil IX was announced…for June 23rd…

…another group headed up by Antonio Diaz of the Texas Indigenous Council was in the planning stages of a June 9th vigil at Hutto. While this was not done to confuse anyone…there seems to be a little confusion. Let’s try to clarify it this way.

Hutto Vigil IX. This is a Hutto Vigil. It is headed up by Antonio Diaz and his group. We will therefore identify it as Hutto Vigil IX. It will be held on June 9th. We applaud the initiative and encourage all who can to support it. We encourage you to call Antonio to get the specifics. For info call (210)396=9805. E-mail: texasindigenouscouncil@yahoo.com.

Hutto Vigil X. This is the vigil sponsored by Amnesty International. Many organizations have committed to support that vigil, including LULAC. This vigil will be held on June 23rd. Amnesty International will make the public announcement with the exact details at a future date. The Hutto Vigil X date of June 23rd was selected because it falls on the weekend of the International Day of the Refugee. Folks will be coming from around the country to attend Hutto Vigil X.

Here’s a brief yet special update from Freedom Ambassadors…Gloria Benacci and two daughters…who came up with the coveted “No Child Left Behind Bars” buttons. Gloria says:

“We have T-shirts…logo, white with black/red printing front and back…Spanish and English. (see attached) Only need a better estimate on how many we need. The T-shirts are high quality and our printer does an incredible job.”

These T-shirts will be available for a suggested donation. For more information on the buttons and T-shirts…we invite y’all to visit Free the Children at MySpace where we are approaching 2000 friends…and according to Gloria…going on 10,000.

Regarding the Hutto vigils…we cannot have too many. If anything…we should try to have more. We should all try to muster up all of the expressed outrage that we can…against the imprisonment of innocent little children…and those who would profit off of them.

Hutto is like an ugly boil that has come to the head. It is so in your face. It violates everything we believe as a people. Unless we put a stop to this kind of abuse of democracy…such atrocities will go from ugly to uglier. Why do we say that? In May of last year…for the Hutto dedication…the proud architect of imprisoning innocent children…Chertoff, himself…bragged about Hutto being the prototype for future prison camps for families.

We the people happen to disagree with this demented concept and we are letting Chertoff, Bush, Congress, the U.N….and the world community know…that in no uncertain terms…we will not tolerate such conduct that defies all universal laws. Americans with a conscience will keep growing in numbers and massing together…to free the innocent children of the world. Taking down their prize razor wire, after months of protest, does not change the fact that the tender lives of little ones are being abused by the world’s biggest bullies.

In solidarity…we come to their rescue. We come to demand their freedom…and the freedom of their mothers. We come to defend our family and our race. The human family and the human race.

No Child Left Behind Bars

Free the Children

Jay

“If you make peaceful change impossible….. you make violent revolution inevitable.” President John F Kennedy

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez reference this article in their report on the boy they helped to free. Will Suzi be Next? Below, Isenberg says he’s working on it.–gm

Texas Samaritan for Canadian boy says he’ll help more kids detained in U.S.

BETH GORHAM

Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — Ralph Isenberg never met the nine-year-old Canadian boy he helped spring from a Texas immigration jail.

But the fate of Kevin Yourdkhani, who finally headed to Toronto on Wednesday with his Iranian parents, is still very personal for Isenberg, a wealthy Dallas property manager.

“I’m so happy. I pray to God that Canadians welcome that family home. Now it’s on to the next family.”
Mr. Isenberg, 55, who says he had his own immigration nightmare over the status of his Chinese wife, is determined to get all the kids out of the T. Don Hutto detention facility near Austin, Texas. He wants to force officials to shut it down.

“The conditions are atrocious,” Mr. Isenberg said from Dallas. “When I see an injustice where I can do something, I step right in. I’m not afraid of these bastards. To hell with ’em.”

A colourful, blunt-speaking businessman, Mr. Isenberg tears up when discussing how detainees have been treated by authorities.

He says the U.S. Immigration Control Enforcement is out of control. “They need to be put out of business.”

“You can’t allow a law-enforcement agency to have such power over all these foreign nationals. ICE in itself is creating terrorists of the future by jailing kids nine or 10 or 15 years old,” he said.

“I’ve seen the faces of the children who’ve been in there. Those kids are damaged goods.”

Kevin Yourdkhani was born in Canada. His parents lived in Toronto for 10 years before they were deported to Iran in 2005.

They were caught with fake passports by U.S. authorities in early February when they made an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico while en route to Canada to seek asylum for the second time.

They spent weeks in detention. Kevin, who was threatened with foster care, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and pleaded to be allowed to go home.

Last week, Ottawa granted the three a temporary residence permit.

Mr. Isenberg read about the boy’s case early on and stepped in, covering US$1,000 for travel permits and offering to pay the legal fees of the family’s Canadian lawyers.

While others are working on a lawsuit designed to close the facility, Isenberg works with individual families like Kevin’s.

“Somebody’s got to do it. You don’t need any more reason than it’s not right,” he says.

“It’s plain, pure and simple – not right. His was the most egregious case. He was literally kidnapped.”

“I don’t think our government understands what they did to that family.”

There is, though, a compelling reason for Mr. Isenberg’s activism and the money he devotes to it – his own battle over the status of his second wife, Nicole.

She had come to the United States in 1999 seeking political asylum. In 2003, by then Mr. Isenberg’s fiancee, she spent 52 days in the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell after authorities nabbed her for failing to attend a hearing.

The prison, a mix of hardened criminals and immigration cases, was “a hell hole out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Isenberg, with scant services or medical attention for detainees.

“All you have to do is experience the screams of your fiancee with an abscessed tooth, no one to help her.”

Nicole was eventually force to leave the United States. The couple and their baby had just returned in January from 14 months in China while they sorted out her case. She is now a legal permanent resident of the United States.

“I was in exile,” said Mr. Isenberg. “It was a terrible ordeal.”

It was after his return that he found out about the Hutto facility, opened last May by the Homeland Security Department.

“I went crazy when I heard about it,” he said.

“I may not have been in prison but I certainly know what this government is capable of doing to anyone and everyone.”

“If we do this to foreign nationals, it’s going to be us next.”

About half of some 400 people at Hutto are children. None of the detained have criminal records.

U.S. officials say the facility, and one like it in Pennsylvania, provide a humane way to keep families together while immigration laws are being enforced. Officials say this is what Congress directed them to do. But activists say legislators actually wanted the families held in home-like environments, not jails where they sleep in cells, wear prison garb and face major restrictions.

Mr. Isenberg helped secure the release last month of the Ibrahims, a Palestinian family held at Hutto since November on immigration violations.

When they got out, he sent a limousine to pick up Hanan and four of her five children. Their father was imprisoned hundreds of kilometres away while the family’s youngest, a three-year-old, stayed with an uncle.

Next, Mr. Isenberg is taking up the cause of three or four families who are Iraqi and Syrian.

And he’s hoping for the imminent release of Suzi Hazahza, 20, and her sister Mirvat from the same prison where his wife was once locked up.

Mr. Isenberg said it’s terrible to think about what U.S. officials did to Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was sent to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured.

“I think of that poor person at least once a week,” he said. “I’m kind of blessed. At least I haven’t been tortured.”

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.”

With the sounds of traffic swooshing by him, and accompanied by John Neck, Ken Koym, and Juan Torres, Jay Johnson-Castro kept walking as he gave the following update via cell phone. The reference to the federal judge comes from Juan Castillo’s story below in which Austin Federal Judge Sam Sparks is quoted as saying convicted felons have more rights than immigrant detainees. Here is what Jay says on the morning of the Raymondville vigil, scheduled for 1:00 pm.–gm

A lot of my suspicion is being reconfirmed after talking to the attorneys and a couple of fellow journalists. The newspapers here are basically anti-immigrant and we are not going to get any coverage down here.
I asked them is it political? Are political favors being asked? One said yes. The other said it was more due to apathy. They just quit covering stuff like that.

Looking at the big picture with the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, and the Rolling Plains prison at Haskell, then coming down here, we’re making gains.

If a federal judge sides with common sense and moral values of grassroots America, I guess some of us feel we’re on the right page. But really this is not about legal or illegal, it’s about moral or immoral, conscionable or unconscionable. The fact we made gains on Hutto means that layer by layer we are going to peel the onion back and get to the core of this thing.

I have also heard that the International Educational Services (IES) school is more kindly than it was two years ago when it was under immigration authorities. The kids do rotate through every 2-3 months, but nobody knows where they go.

At Raymondville, the biggest concern of attorneys is the lack of food. And that’s a result of running these camps for profit. The people are in windowless cells 23 hours a day.

They agreed the greatest vulnerability to ICE was the children in Hutto as far as exposing the source of this human tragedy. Which brings us back to the prisons for profit concept, and how the guarantees of prison detention boosted the stock value of these companies.

This is a time of darkness in our country’s history. Hopefully, it will be better exposed. What will it take to trigger outrage. Smokestacks? Who cares enough to skip breakfast or their favorite tv program before they say the people running these camps should not be committing these crimes or even be in power. That’s where we are at in all reality.

I love the little letter from Thailand. If in other places people are feeling a sense of what we feel, I consider it an accomplishment itself. Now, when do we get these things shut down?