Category: Detention

Evening amigos…

Here’s an update on the Hutto prison camp vigil. It is a 21st Century American Tragedy. This is how it all starts…



Demented minds believe that they have the right to treat women and children this way. They round them up with weapons. They put them in camps. They treat them as criminals. The difference is that “We the people of the United States of America ” will use our freedoms of speech, assembly, press and worship to stop this international criminal activity. It WILL cease to occur in our county!!!
In Hutto there are innocent children and their moms from some 20 different countries. Why couldn’t the media speak with them Friday? Do we not have enough proof now of dishonesty, deception, willful misinformation and outright media manipulation? Fortunately, the seasoned media didn’t fall for the lipstick on the pig dishonesty.

Tomorrow…Monday…at 5:30pm…we will hold Vigil VI. It will be a Sunset-Candlelight Vigil to FREE THE CHILDREN. If you believe that putting a child in prison is a crime…please join us. These children should not spend one more day in a prison camp…let alone in Texas …let alone on American soil. Hutto and those who authorize and run it are committing a crime against humanity. This is a grotesque violation of the international Right of the Child.

How dare the Bush administration proclaim the spread of democracy around the world while he funnels $7000 of honest hard earned American earners’ money per month to his business associates for every child his administration keeps behind bars? Then they claim that it is the immigrant that is ripping the country off! How dare Chertoff and ICE proclaim that this is in the interest of our national security? How dare CCA, the Williamson County Commissioners and the prison guards profit off of this inhumanity? Didn’t Tom DeLay take $100,000 from CCA?

This is not American. This is not justice. This is not moral. This is not even legal. Those who are complicit in this criminal act should suffer what they are subjecting these children to. There should be criminal indictments against all who are accomplices in this crime. That would be American, just, moral … and legal.

We appeal to all ethnic, religious and political groups to join us. Each knows how their own group has been oppressed at some time in this country’s history and subject to inhumane treatment because it was either “legal” at the time … or because people were afraid to stand up and speak out against domestic terrorism and where fear prevailed. We who are willing to oppose this inhumanity perpetrated against the children and their moms, who are in the Hutto prison camp from 20 different countries, do not fear to speak out against this un-American, inhumane and criminal abuse. We are not only going to speak out … we are going to SHOUT it out!!!

So … those of you who can and so desire … we’ll see y’all at the Hutto prison camp in Taylor , TX tomorrow afternoon. In another e-mail, we’ll be sending directions and media updates.

Please feel free to pass this along and invite all who share our conviction and commitment to FREE THE CHILDREN…

Jay

P.S. Remember that the most the comprehensive archival of the Hutto prison camp info can be found at http://www.texascivilrightsreview.org. jjj

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The Border Ambassador

Connecting.the.dots…making.a.difference…

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Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Del Rio, Texas, USA
Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico

Back in January when Jay Johnson-Castro scheduled Monday’s vigil at the T. Don Hutto jail, he called it Vigil IV. Then today, in recognition of Friday’s protests, he renumbered it Vigil V.

But we got to thinking. Actually, Monday’s action should be Vigil VI, because surely we have to count the folks who stood out in the cold on the morning of Feb. 3 to welcome the Ibrahim family out of jail.

Vigil IV, therefore, has gone to Vigil VI in about a week. Meanwhile, the Hutto headline has topped the charts of global news.

“If we can’t make peace in our own land,” said Ralph Isenberg over the phone today, “I don’t know how we can make peace in the rest of the world.”

Indeed, this is the profound promise of the Hutto Vigils, that they will help to mark a time in history when Americans were galvanized to the challenge of lifting ourselves up to a new plateau of peace and peacemaking. Today it seems so clear that we need not settle for less.–gm

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro

Day before yesterday…when the media toured Hutto … I was wrapping up a Border Caravan journey from San Diego , CA to Brownsville , TX . On every stop … before the media and the interested groups and political leaders … I spoke about all the innocent children and their moms in Hutto and the Ibrahim and Suleiman families. Folks rejoiced with me as we heard about the successful release of the entire Ibrahim family. Folks are outraged about the deportation of the Suleiman family. I can assure you the groundswell of opposition to this tyrannical rule by greedy fascism is growing faster than yeast can raise bread dough!
Later on today…I will send you pictures of something far more morbid than Hutto. I beg that you share this as I shared the plight of the Ibrahims and the Suleiman. Mass graves…fresh ones…on American soil … !!! Graves of desperate immigrants who died … one way or the other … on their quest for the American dream. If none of those here are not already on my e-mail list … let me know if you want those pictures.

Attached is a sample. If you use your power of reason and find yourself asking questions … basic questions … about what your mind sees in this picture … I hope you’ll help me crack this case wide open. I want to know about everyone that is supposed buried in this trench. How many men, women, children. Who pays to do this, who gets paid…and how much. Who did the autopsies…and how did these people die. Use your photo program and zoom in on this picture. Let your mind go beyond the superficial. And … why were so many buried at the same time … like the day before we were there. Ours are the first foot prints on this soil!

The truth must and will be told to the American public about these mass graves …. just as we successfully got the truth about Hutto and the Palestinian families out to the media … and we forced ICE to capitulate. We will do it again … and again … and again! Until … we break the back of this tyranny.

Also … PLEASE join us in Taylor tomorrow for Vigil V. There are hundreds of children more that need to be freed … just as the Ibrahim children are now free. We need treat this as a fire in the old days … with a bucket brigade of folks who want to save lives. We cannot simply do nothing. We must do all we can NOW to free the children. One more day of living in a cell … is one day too long.

Tu amigo…

Jay

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The Border Ambassador

Connecting.the.dots…making.a.difference…

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Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Del Rio , Texas , USA
Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico

Jay renumbers Monday’s upcoming vigil to five, in consideration of those who protested during the Hutto media tour Friday.–gm

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews

“This is pathetically sickening. This is outrageously sickening. What is the government trying to accomplish by terrorizing people who want to be Americans?”

That’s how Jay Johnson-Castro responded by telephone to the front-page story in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times about the T. Don Hutto prison at Taylor, Texas.

He was specifically talking about news that a 9-year-old girl and her father were abducted from their home in Phoenix during a raid similar to the operation that imprisoned three Palestinian families in Texas. The father from Phoenix is married to an American citizen and had on the previous day stopped by an immigration office to see how he could fix his lapsed status.
“The fact that someone is in this country illegally doesn’t mean they have broken a law,” says Ralph Isenberg by telephone from Dallas.

“A person who is told one day that they have status and another day that they don’t is not a person who has broken the law,” says Isenberg. “It’s not the same as murder.”

“The Ibrahim family were told they were in the country illegally, but they were trying to appeal their status. Once that appeal was considered, instantly the family went from being unlawful to lawful,” says Isenberg.

“The same thing may happen with the Hazahza family very soon. We have asked Joshua Bardavid and Ted Cox to prepare their writ of habeas corpus,” says Isenberg. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] should release the Hazahzas or shut down their prisons altogether, which would be just as good.”

Further South, Johnson-Castro’s voice crosses the border as he drives across an international bridge into Reynosa, Mexico.

He agrees that the public voice began to speak with the November elections, and he thinks that hard-right border policies had something to do with it.

In weeks leading up the November elections, Johnson-Castro started a campaign of conscience against a proposed border wall. Last week, when he returned to the Rio Grande Valley with activists from other border states, he found media and mayors eager to carry a message of border compassion.

If proponents of hard-line immigration policy think they are going to win with fear and prejudice, they need to think again.

“We have taken their trump card,” says Johnson-Castro. “And we have torn it up!”

Driving through Reynosa, Mexico, Johnson-Castro talks over the cell phone about the social and economic landscape.

“I have documentation that people here are getting paid eight to ten dollars a day for 9.6 hours of work, six days a week,” says Johnson-Castro

“Often they are not given their bonuses. If the factory they are working for changes hands, they lose all their seniority and have to start all over again from scratch,” he says.

“There are toxic waste dumps near these factories, and many of the workers are single moms,” he adds.

“Then when they want to cross the line to work for minimum wage, they are treated like criminals by the same powers who are exploiting them in their country back home.” Many of these Reynosa factories are American owned and pay dividends to American pensioners and other stock holders.

“We now have labor camps that are American owned a couple of minutes from the USA, we have prison camps for profit from the USA. We have plans to build a Berlin wall on USA soil–for profit!

“Prsident Bush is going to totally militarize the Texas-Mexican border, doubling troops and equipment for profit.

“Now we have secret cemeteries where people are buried who die along the border. We don’t know who they are, yet they are buried for profit.

“Where have we seen all this before? Let’s learn form the Germans and tear it all down before it’s built.”

On Monday evening at 5:30 Johnson-Castro will resume a series of nonviolent vigils outside the Hutto prison camp.

“People with true American spirit who recognize they are immigrants or descendants of immigrants will stand up to these imperialistic, nationalistic, supremacistic, and racist tactics,” says Johnson-Castro. “And I think it will happen fast.”

Indeed the placement and tone of news stories about the Hutto prison are evidence that a certain line has been crossed among news audiences across the country.

Back in Dallas, Ralph Isenberg reflects on his long-standing battles with ICE and the way he has been treated by business partners and friends.

“Not one has complained about my cause this time,” says Isenberg. “My business partners and friends are saying, ‘go do what you need to do; this is wrong.’ “

We got the tip from Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr., who writes, We’ve wondered where the next Hutto would be.”

Apparently there is federal contract up for bid to build a new detention center for immigrant women and children. And an “undisclosed” company would like to put the project outside Las Cruces, NM.

Here’s a link to the story by Todd G. Dickson posted at the Las Cruces Bulletin.