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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. . . .

What would you consider a good reason to send a dozen armed police into a family home, arrest everyone age 11 to 60 and throw them in prison?

According to our source at the Dallas Federal Courthouse today, the reason turns out to be that the federal government claims it sent a letter to the father of the family asking him for a meeting to discuss his immigration status.
The federal magistrate judge presiding over the hearing asked if the feds sent the letter to everyone in the family? No, the letter was sent to the father only. Could the feds prove that they actually sent the letter to Radi Hazahza? No they could not.

“So this is why 15 people came with assault weapons into the Hazahza home, sticking gun barrels to their heads, arresting them and sending them to prison?” asks Jay Johnson-Castro, who stood vigil outside the Dallas federal courthouse Thursday morning.

He says courtroom observers described the magistrate as very distraught about the government’s case. The magistrate assured the US Attorney that if the Hazahzas lingered in prison past the six-month mark, the US Attorney would find himself ordered back to court to explain.

With about five weeks left until the six-month limit expires, some of the courthouse observers were hoping for an earlier release of the four Hazahzas who remain in the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas. Two of the Hazahzas were released from the T. Don Hutto prison earlier this year.

“If they keep the Hazahzas another month, that’s another seven-thousand-dollars per person that the prison camp gets to collect,” said Johnson-Castro in response to the day’s legal event.

“Everybody’s in agreement that what the US is doing is not legal,” he says. “The US Attorneys don’t want to defend the legality of these actions. But if what they are doing is not legal, then it’s illegal.”

Apparently one legal consequence of keeping this case at the level of “distraught magistrate” on Thursday is to evade an outright ruling by a federal judge, which would not be kind to this recent exercise of federal power. So why not free the Hazahzas on Friday?–gm

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?

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / ElectronicIntifada / OpEdNews / IndyBay /
UrukNet

One by one, all the helium-inflated excuses for arresting and imprisoning Suzi Hazahza have been popped and now lie on the ground. And the single memory humanizing the government that still holds her unlawfully behind bars is the look on one Federal Magistrate’s face Thursday in Dallas when he was told by a US Attorney that Congress has stripped the federal bench of any right to order Suzi Hazahza freed until a full six months of illegal detention have passed.
Anguish is the word that some observers have used to describe the look on the judge’s face as he wrestled with the impotence of his authority before the power of Homeland Security to arrest and detain innocent immigrants.

“Believe it or not, immigration law is replete with that language,” explains New York immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid from his New York office on Friday evening, as sounds of the street honk outside his window. “Congress has told the courts that many discretionary decisions by immigration authorities are unreviewable.” In this case, the unreviewable decision involves the unlawful six-month imprisonment of an innocent immigrant in the hellish privatized Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas.

Over the weekend, Bardavid will work up his motion pleading with the Federal Magistrate to exercise his unimpeachable power to enforce the Constitution, with its protections against unlawful seizure and guarantees of due process. But the argument will be a a tough sell politically, because in order to take legal responsibility for Suzi Hazahza, the federal courts will have to state plainly that Homeland Security is using its discretionary authority to break the Constitution on American soil. For an aspiring federal magistrate under the administration of George the Bush II, such a ruling could mean the end of a career and almost certain reversal by the Fifth Circuit judges who gave us the racist Hopwood ruling not too many years ago (the ruling that abolished affirmative action in Texas for several years).

“It is extraordinarily upsetting and frustrating that we can live in a system where it is possible that a judge concludes that detention is unlawful but that he himself has no authority to release the prisoner,” says Bardavid. But that could be the best hand-wringing effort that the federal courts will make in this case. And it would be a nauseating retreat from the principle of habeas corpus at home.

For Suzi Hazahza, the reality of a powerless judiciary branch, disabled by a weak Congress, will leave her to the hands of a muscular executive power without checks or balances. She will be living in a virtual police state until May 3, when the six-month deadline for her unlawful detention expires. For the rest of us, that leaves a question. If we allow Suzi Hazahza and other innocent immigrants to live in a police state for six months at a time, what are we allowing Homeland Security to make of America?

On the first Friday in November, 2006 Suzi Hazahza was arrested at gunpoint inside her father’s home and transported with the rest of her family to an immigration jail in Dallas. By the first Sunday in November, the administration had scored its Dalls-area headlines about the arrest and detention of “criminal aliens” such as the seven Hazahas and other immigrant families.

In order to make the case that the pre-election roundup was a hit for Homeland Security, immigration authorities posted a press release on the internet that included a mug shot of Suzi’s 17-year-old brother Ahmed, deliberately misidentifying his age as an 18-year-old adult, and maliciously publicizing his juvenile delinquency as a burglar. There are international laws against the use of children for propaganda purposes. But with the administration facing a grim election challenge, no trick seemed too dirty to pull. On that first Sunday in November, Ahmed was placed into solitary confinement, because he was a juvenile in an adult facility at the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas.

Not only did Homeland Security know exactly how old Ahmed was, but they knew that his birthday was coming soon. So he was not sent with his mother and younger brother to the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, Texas, where all the other immigrant juveniles of the pre-election roundup were sent. By the first Sunday in November, the Hazahza family had been split between two Texas prisons, with mother Juma and 11-year-old Mohammad sent to Hutto, while father Radi was sent to Rolling Plains with his two adult daughters and his two oldest sons.

What Homeland Security will not put into a press release is that the Hazahza family never tried to hide from anybody. They entered the USA legally with visas and applied for asylum to protect themselves from politics back home. Although they have been ordered deported to Jordan or Palestine, visas have been denied by authorities at both places. All the adult members of the family were law abiding citizens. Radi worked as a vehicle inspector. His oldest son Hisham worked as a cell phone salesman. His oldest daughter Mirvat managed the office of an insurance agent and is married to an American citizen. His youngest daughter Suzi had devoted herself to the care of her mother Juma and was engaged to be married to an American citizen in December.

At the federal magistrate hearing on Thursday, the US Attorney admitted that immigration authorities could not prove they had sent a letter to Radi Hazahza ordering him to report for a meeting. They had not sent the letter with return-receipt requested. They had no affidavit from immigration personnel stating that the letter had been mailed. They had no service documents.

“I even asked them if they had a photocopy of the envelope,” recalls Bardavid. But no, they didn’t even have that.

Furthermore, the letter they showed the judge misstated the facts of the Hazahza immigration case in such a way that it didn’t seem to arise from within a knowledgeable process. The letter stated that the Hazahzas of Palestine and Jordan had been ordered deported to Israel, which is a lie. In any case, it was the wrong form.

“That letter was so fundamentally flawed that it can’t be given legal effect,” argued Bardavid in Dallas. “Therefore the detention based on that letter is unlawful. Even the US Attorney seemed surprised by the errors in the document and promised to look into the matter further.”

“I have difficulty grasping in my head this is occurring,” says Bardavid from his New York office. “The government did not refute any allegations that we made about the prison conditions, or the fact that the Hazahzas were allegedly sent the wrong form, or lack of proof of service for that letter, or that the facts were flawed. The premise of their entire case was that this federal court does not have jurisdiction in these matters.”

Despite the horrible implications for Suzi Hazahza, America should send her a thank you note. Thanks to Suzi’s unjust treatment we now have proof that our Homeland Security machine has pulled loose from its Constitutional moorings. Homeland Security has become a pirate operation unto itself. Each passing day of Suzi’s imprisonment gives us one more reason to demand the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and immediate action by Congress to strip the agency of its power to evade federal court review.