Category: Detention

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / ElectronicIntifada / DissidentVoice

Tasting the food that Suzi Hazahza cooked for him on that first Thursday in November, Reza Barkhordari couldn’t have been more joyful. He went to Suzi’s house every night after work, to sit with her whole family. And each night, the wedding drew a day closer.

“We met at a local Middle Eastern coffee shop in Richardson, Texas called the Al-Afrah,” recalls Reza over the telephone. “That’s where I saw her for the first time, and it was instant connection. It was so strong that Suzi’s mother noticed and helped in connecting the two of us. Shortly after that Suzi and I both realized it was something that was meant to be, and we would be spending our whole lives together. That was on August 6, 2005.”
“I proposed to her on August 6, 2006, our first anniversary. My mother encouraged me to do it, and she sent a diamond ring to Suzi. We were to be married over the Christmas holidays.”

In preparation for the wedding, Reza invited the Hazahza family to move closer to his home in Plano, where it would be easier to keep everyone in daily contact. On the first Monday in November, they were to close on a home in Frisco. What American dream could have seemed more complete?

The first Friday of November, however, found Reza driving to the Dallas offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in search of the love of his life. Suzi and her entire family had been rounded up at gunpoint.

There was father Radi, a 60-year-old refugee from Palestine–a proud provider who had seen better days as a banker in Jordan–now working as a state-certified car inspector. And mother Juma, the one who had steered her daughter toward love, and who shared Suzi’s delicate preferences for freshly-cooked food.

There was sister Mirvat, a 24-year-old newlywed who still lived at home because the religious rites for her marriage had not been completed. She had graduated with honors from North Lake Community College and was running the office of a local insurance agent.

There was brother Hisham, a 23-year-old sales whiz and prized manager for a cell phone company who was moving rapidly from management into ownership, on the verge of opening his own store. And there were younger brothers Ahmad and Mohammad, ages 17 and 11.

Like two other Palestinian families in Dallas, all of them had been rousted from bed at gunpoint and marched out the door in their bedclothes. They were locked away, Reza was told. He could not see Suzi on Friday.

On Saturday, Reza drove again to Dallas ICE, hoping to see Suzi and her family. But no, that was impossible. Then on Sunday ICE gave Reza a little hope. Suzi had been moved to the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell, Texas along with her two oldest brothers, her sister, and her father. Visiting hours lasted until 4:00 pm. If Reza could get there before 4:00, said ICE, then he could see Suzi.

Reza headed West in his car, calling a friend on his cell phone to get directions as he drove into afternoon sun. It was already past noon, and he had a four-hour drive in front of him. If he went just a little bit faster, he could make it in time, and he did, pulling into the immigration jail at 3:45 pm. But it would take ten minutes to get Suzi, explained the guards. And despite Reza’s begging, they told him the visit would not be worth the trouble. Dejected, Reza drove back home.

For the next five weekends Reza planned his visits to Haskell carefully. He drove from Dallas on Friday night and visited with the Hazahza men on Saturday. Then on Sunday he met his beloved Suzi.

One week he recalls Suzi came to the meeting with a fever and cough. She explained that she tried to get medical help but without luck. So Reza made some phone calls and complained. When Suzi’s younger brother reported blood in his urine, Reza called about that, too.

After making complaints to ICE, Reza completed his fifth week of visits. He had no way of knowing that after the fifth visit, things for Suzi would suddenly get worse. She called from Haskell begging her fiancé never to come see her again.

After the fifth visit from Reza, Suzi Hazahza had been subjected to a full body-cavity search.

To this day, Suzi Hazahza refuses all visitors. She will not see the love of her life, Reza. She will not see her mother Juma, recently released from the T. Don Hutto jail in Taylor, Texas. Nor will she see her baby brother Mohammad who was released with Juma. She will not risk another visitor because she is determined to never again let the guards at Haskell prison search her like that again.

New York attorneys Joshua Bardavid and Ted Cox will return to Texas next week to file federal habeas corpus motions in behalf of Suzi Hazahza and her family. The motions they filed for the Ibrahim family in early February worked very well, proving that ICE had no good reason for taking them to jail. Not only were all the Ibrahims freed from Hutto and Haskell both, but Juma and Mohammad Hazahza were also freed from Hutto, two days before a press tour there.

In the coming weeks, as a protest movement grows around the issue of children in prison, let us not forget that 20-year-old Suzi has been wrongfully imprisoned, too. To quit the terror of Suzi Hazahza, she and the rest of her family deserve to be immediately freed.

What is it like for Reza to think about Suzi these days? He takes a call from her every night. Last night he put her on the line with Juma and Mohammad in order to continue this interview.

“You have to understand, this is not your standard strip search,” explains Reza. “What they do makes her extremely uncomfortable.” And how did that chilling phone call from Suzi make him feel, when the love of his life begged him to visit no more? “I felt like I was on fire,” he says. “There’s so much pain. Just to be honest with you, I am literally sick to my stomach.”

And with each night’s phone call from Haskell to Dallas, the marriage of Reza and Suzi, the meant-to-be lovers, slips further away….

Hola y’all…

This is about a historical 5000 mile journey that begins in three weeks. We wanted you to have a heads up.

You are being sent this e-mail because you are (1) opposed to the border wall, (2) if you are interested in putting and end to incarcerating women and children in prison camps on American soil…(3) if you’re interested in preventing the death toll that is as a result of failed immigration policies in this country…(4) some of, or (5) all of the above.

The Attached is the schedule for Marcha Migrante II-Border Caravan which will focus on (5)…“all the above”.

Link to Jan. 12 version of schedule

One of the features of the Marcha Migrante II is that the Border Caravan will not only go from San Diego, CA all the way to Brownsville, TX…it will also swing up to Taylor, Texas…where 400-600 women and mostly children are imprisoned behind razor wire walls, in prison uniforms and are kept in cells for 22 hours a day.

Taylor is just 35 miles northeast of the Texas Capitol city of Austin . There we will hold a third vigil at the Hutto prison camp. By doing this we will be able to show our unrelenting opposition to the imprisoning of helpless women and innocent children in FOR PROFIT prison camps.
I am providing you with a video link of the Christmas Eve Vigil that was conducted this past December 24 at the Hutto prison camp in Taylor , TX and sponsored by my Flamenco artist friends, Teye & Belen, and me. This video clip is provided the young documentary film maker, Jesse Salmeron. www.jessesalmeron.com

This schedule remains a work in progress. As we progress, more precise details, such as departure and arrival times and locations, will be easier to determine and we will therefore post them.

We obviously need to have some flexibility on this 5000 mile journey. We hope to have a website available to track our progress. When we do, we’ll notify you. (As always…if you prefer to not receive this information…we will accommodate your wishes.)
and we will therefore post them.

If you or an association that you are affiliated with would like to provide food, lodging…or would simply like to show solidarity with us in any way, please contact us. Please feel free to share and forward this to your friends, families, organizations, political and religious representatives and those that you know in the media.
and we will therefore post them.

Most especially…if you are able to arrange it…please join us…anywhere along the way…
and we will therefore post them.

Hasta entonces…

Jay

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Border Ambassador

Connecting the Dots…Making a Difference

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Del Rio, Texas

Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico

PlanetFlamenco

Teye is a Flamenco artist who along with Jay Johnson-Castro is returning to the Hutto prison camp Christmas Eve for a vigil–a Flamenco vigil. The Texas Civil Rights Review sent a few questions via email:

TCRR: I hear you are from Europe, and that your family has had experience with fascism.

Teye: I am actually from the Netherlands: My father was a soldier in Rotterdam when it was bombed by the Germans in May 1940 (my father was 40 years my senior, and I’m 49 now).
My father nor mother ever allowed even one ugly word in our house on Germans: he always said that the Germans were by and large brainwashed and misinformed by the nazi fanatics. He spent months in German captivity; then was allowed to return home, then when the nazis started to deport capable men to do forced labor, he like many others disappeared underground and hid out. He never was discovered nor betrayed and survived the war intact as did my mother.

We will need to separate the term FASCISM from the idea “everything bad”. Fascism is basically defined thus: the government works closely together with
the big corporations and they mutually enlarge each others power. It is the pyramid of power: a broad and obedient and mis/disinformed base, narrowing towards
the top where the power sits and the information is made. The nazis definitely fit the description!

TCRR: What is your motivation for going back to the Hutto jail Christmas Eve?

Teye: My motivation to do the Christmas Eve event, which will be really more of a Gypsy Campfire Flamenco gathering, only without the campfire of course,
but with candles, is that I want to bring hope to especially the children inside.

I’ve tried to contact the prison to offer a free of charge flamenco performance inside, for the children and their parents and for the staff, but I never heard
back from them. So we will do it outside. I am positive that the rumor will travel to the inside of the facility that there are some people right by the entrance who choose to celebrate their Christmas Eve in support, so
that the children and their families may know that they are neither forgotten nor ignored.

And let us not forget: they must feel forgotten inside: The lawyer who is representing them tells us that SEVEN INMATES HOLD VALID IMMIGRATION VISAS ISSUED BY THE US GOVERNMENT, but since there is no effective appeal in the system of for-profit private prisons, they are still being held in detention!

TCRR: How are people responding to your call for a Christmas Eve vigil?

Teye: Reactions from people have been enormously positive: I am getting emails in from all over the world, pledging support and dedicating a virtual candle. And that is the second idea behind this Gypsy Candlelight performance: to raise awareness via the grassroots alternative circuit: and it is working.

TCRR: Why go back to Hutto jail only a week after the first vigil?

Teye: We have GOT TO KEEP THE BALL ROLLING until this situation changes for the better.

On Christmas Eve we celebrate the joyful birth of Jesus: the big ray of Hope Peace and Sunshine that was given to ALL humankind! The Gypsies have always said that God created this world for ALL of us!
And I do not believe that [means] incarcerating children. So we need to keep at it.

On the occasion of Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Eid ul-Adha, 2006

By Greg Moses

“21 criminal aliens, fugitive aliens, and other immigration status violators” is how the Dallas office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) counted booty in a web-posted press release last Nov. 3 following two days of arrests.

Two months later, three families from that pre-election roundup remain in jail, of whom only one person—a teenaged boy—stands convicted of crimes, and that 17-year-old young man sits alone, pissing blood, in isolation from his parents and four siblings, because he is being held as a minor in an adult jail at Haskell, Texas.

For all the rest of the members of the three families, none, as it turns out, has been identified as either criminal or fugitive. They were only a handful of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” coming to America with passports and visas, working with attorneys to secure asylum through legal means, going to work, to school, and in some cases getting married or pregnant, trying to live and make life in ways we all know.
But they were all Arab, and it was election time in the USA. Never mind that seven of them were school children, or that one of them was a newlywed bride, recently graduated from college with honors, or that another was pursuing college on and off, planning to be married, or that the six parents worked hard and kept their families close. They were Arab, after all, and it was election time.

I still get emails from people telling me “we should send them all back”, and these are emails from precisely the kinds of voters that such a roundup was meant, and is still meant, to appease. Thirteen percent of Americans think Bush is a hero. And with these three Arab families, the President repays his loyalists for the way they stick.

But I also get emails from others, many more others, who say, “my God, what can I do to help.” And these are the majority of voters, to be sure, thank goodness. And for most of the voters, these three families–Ibrahim, Suleiman, and Hazahza–are just the kind of people that neighbors are made of in America. They try, they fail, they try again, they succeed. Family troubles come, and to some families they come hard. But we know them, if we know any neighborhood at all.

One of the email supporters, Rita Zawaideh, has mobilized the Arab American Community Coalition, and a call to action has been circulated to free the Ibrahim family, whose toddler daughter needs them out of jail now and back home.

Really, it’s the simplest thing. Free the Ibrahim family. Free the pregnant mother so that she can take proper care of herself and her coming son. Free the kindergarten daughter who shares a bunkbed with her mother. Free the two sisters who share another cell nearby. Free the teenage boy who calls his uncle every day from the T. Don Hutto jail in Taylor, Texas. And free the father, too, who is kept 300 miles away, at Haskell.

That’s it. Free the Ibrahim family today. It can be done very quickly by anyone along the chain of command from the White House to San Antonio ICE. And if you’re listening, Mr. President, you can do it with the stroke of a pen. Those voters who would make a fortress of America? You’ll never have need for them again. But your conscience is something you really can’t leave behind.

The New Year is a traditional time for politicians to set people free. Let the Ibrahims go back to their neighborhood in Texas, where they can gather themselves as a family and get some rest, together.

[Note: recommended listening: Lyle Lovett, “That’s right, you’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you, anyway!”–gm]

Teye & Belen Flamenco Gypsy Candlelight Christmas Eve Vigil for the Incarcerated Children [T. Don Hutto Jail, Taylor, Texas]

What initially seemed the most unlikely way to enjoy Christmas eve turned into one of the most beautiful and moving season celebrations I have ever
experienced.

Yes, it was raining, and it was cold. Cold and wet to break out a quality flamenco guitar and play it. Cold to do a performance out in the open air. We
were forced to improvise a makeshift construction to huddle under: consisting of our suburban, our lightshow stand, a microphone stand, a tarp and some
bungee cords, and in the end, with all the candles, it almost resembled a nativity scene.
Initially there were only a few of us, but as the hour of the vigil went by, more and more people came, local people but also those who drove in from Dallas, McAllen, Houston, Del Rio. (For those not familiar with either the vastness of Texas or its speed limits, we are talking three, four, even seven hours of driving in bad weather!)

People of all ages held a candle, huddled under the improvised canopy or held umbrellas, and we enjoyed the closeness that comes from a common cause.

What was our cause? We were there to protest the incarceration in concrete prison cells, in prison uniforms, of CHILDREN, in a for-profit prison,
with our tax money ($ 95 per detainee per day, that amounts to more than two million dollars a month for this prison alone), right here in the USA, self-proclaimed most special of all countries on earth.

We were here to provide a ray of hope to those inside the prison (for although our initial offer to the prison
of a free Flamenco performance for the detainees and staff went unanswered and we were forced to do it on the street, rumor of such a gathering will surely
find its way into the cells!) and to let them know that there are many Americans who care and will put an end to this.

We were here so that these facts may be broadcast
around the world via the internet, and that eventually the mainstream media will have to pick up on it and that by national and international outrage these
practices will stop. News has traveled fast on the Flamenco internet community and has cast a wider net from there.

While organizing this Vigil, we’ve come upon NEW AND DISTURBING FACTS (thanks Jay Johnson, for the research):

–The prison took it out on the detainees: it has taken away recreational privileges as a direct result of last weeks’ march and vigil. You may ask, why go ahead with the Christmas Vigil? According to a lady who is in touch with those inside, the detainees much preferred their privileges on hold over the feeling of total isolation that they had experienced before.

–The phenomenon of putting children in concrete cells is spreading like an ugly cancer. People who reacted to the Flamenco Newsletters that we sent out all
over the world have informed us that the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Australia, are now all doing it. Some further research quickly revealed that the
prisons in those countries are all built and run by… THE SAME CORPORATIONS AS THOSE WHO RUN THEM IN THE USA. Globalization at its finest.

–These are For-Profit-Prisons indeed: the ONLY way for the detainees to contact anyone on the outside is by means of telephone. And while the actual cost of a phone call is known to us all, the detainees’ only way of calling out is by purchasing a $ 20 PHONE CARD, good for 20 MINUTES. First, this makes it impossible for those who do not have $ 20 to call outside, second, for someone who may not speak the local language, 20 minutes is nothing, third, the corporation makes additional profit by selling 20 minutes for 20
dollars.

–Initially, the number of detainees in the prison in Taylor was given as 400, half of whom are children. It turns out however that at the time of writing, this prison is filled over capacity: more than 650 detainees
are inside, over half of whom are children.

Please let it sink in: 350 CHILDREN IN CONCRETE PRISON CELLS AT CHRISTMAS 2006, IN THE USA, 35 MILES FROM THE CAPITOL OF TEXAS. Merry Christmas.

–Supposedly the children and their mothers are in the concrete cells so that the families may be together (according to the official statement). How to explain then, that the fathers were shipped out to different prisons, in Colorado and elsewhere?

–The prison as it exists in Taylor today is in grave violation of … their own contract with Williamson County, where it states explicitly: “NO RAZOR
WIRE”. Of course, since razor wire is a cheap and secure way of preventing escape, and since this is a prison that must make profit, rolls and rolls of razor wire have been installed.

Please don’t take my word for it! Just take highway 79 North (it branches off from Interstate 35, about a dozen miles north of the State Capital of Texas, Austin) and drive into Taylor. Take a left somewhere before the railroad overpass, and you will soon gaze upon the marvel that, in Good Newspeak, is called the Don Hutto Residential Center.

Believe me, it does not look like a place where you nor your family would want to reside.

WHAT CAN YOU DO???

I am positive that you will be outraged after reading this. Regardless of what one’s feelings are on the difficult subject of immigration, NO ONE agrees to
putting children in concrete cells. So what can you do to help end this?

Nothing could be simpler. Just spread the word. This is understandingly kept low-profile. Two million dollars a month is good income, and the corporations are of course fully aware that imprisoning children will not sit well with most taxpayers, so the last thing the orporation wants is for this to be common knowledge.

And that is where YOU come in. If we ALL SPREAD THE WORD, THIS WILL STOP. Period.

Thank you very much, and a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

–Teye, Austin, Dec 25, 2006