I can’t believe this is happening again – on our soil. You’d think we would have learned our lesson during World War II when our government locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps. Well they’re at it again folks and they’re paying private contractors to lock up families - infants & toddlers – with out tax dollars and in our name.
Make the jump to learn more...
The INS – in it’s infinite wisdom (/snark) has decided to do families a "favor" by keeping them together in a prison in Texas while they await decisions on asylum appeals and other immigration proceedings. From a recent AlterNet article
Named after the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center in Taylor, Texas, opened as a medium-security prison in 1997. Today, the federal government pays CCA, the nation's largest private prison company, $95 per person per day to house the detainees, who wear jail-type uniforms and live in cells.
But they have not been charged with any crimes. In fact, nearly half of its 400 or so residents are children, including infants and toddlers.
snip
In the past, most of them would have been free to work and attend school as their cases moved through immigration courts. "Prior to Hutto, they were releasing people into the community," says Nicole Porter, director of the Prison and Jail Accountability Project for the ACLU of Texas. "These are non-criminals and nonviolent individuals who have not committed any crime against the U.S. There are viable alternatives to requiring them to live in a prison setting and wear uniforms."
Face it folks – this is a concentration camp for families. They’ve committed no crime. The kids get an hour of schooling a day (all English instruction) and an hour to play (no developmental toys for the infants and toddlers). No one’s thinking of their need for counseling to deal with being treated like common criminals and they’re getting sick from the crap food the prison is serving them.
And the cells are tiny – so tiny that families are split up at night when the cells are locked down.
There's a woman with two sons and two daughters; one of her sons was getting really sick at night but she couldn't go to him because he's in a different cell.
The INS (or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves under BushCo) are taking this to extremes. A group collected toys for the children at Christmas time and they wouldn’t let them give the kids stuffed animals for fuck sake.
Texans United for Families is working to get this internment / concentration camp closed down. I found a couple of videos of their vigils at this prison on YouTube. You can view them at this link.
As the wife of a legal immigrant who (knock wood) is solid in his immigration status, this infuriates me. Some of the kids in that detention center are more than likely, American citizens like me. They’re all like my own wee children. They’ve committed no crime. Neither have their parents in most cases. They’re being locked up for the simple "crime" of applying for asylum, or appealing a deportation. Is this the America I learned about in school and from my parents?
What’s happening to our country?
What really got me is a Mother Jones article I found after reading that AlterNet article above...
Inmate Faten Ibrahim was unlikely to escape. She lived at a compound built as a prison for Texas' worst criminals, within a perimeter of razor wire. Her eight-by-eight-foot cell offered only a thin sliver of window, her toilet in an open corner left no cover for stashing break-out tools, and, at any rate, cracking the cell's thick steel door at night would have tripped an alarm. She certainly wasn't going to try bolting, especially since Faten, who lived in the cell with her mother for three months, is five years old.
Five years old, and they’re treating her like public enemy number one. She’s about the same age as my kids and she gets little or no education, and no chance to really play and be a kid. Instead, she’s locked up in a cell with her pregnant mother as if she were some criminal. But what really got me was this from the same article...
Faten, the five-year-old detainee, suffered from nightmares and often sobbed uncontrollably at T. Don Hutto, according to a lawsuit seeking her family's release that was filed late last month by a private attorney. In one instance she was "yelled at and threatened with 'punishment' for her failure to 'stand still'" during the prison's daily population count, the suit said. Her mother, Hanan, who is now five months pregnant, complained of being too tired to join daily showers at 5:30 a.m., but was told that if she didn't she could be put in solitary confinement, according to the suit. To see a gynecologist, according to the lawsuit, Hanan had to travel two hours away, bound in leg irons the entire time, for each prenatal appointment. Her absence from the pod so upset Faten and her siblings, aged eight and 14, that their mother stopped seeking medical treatment rather than leave them alone. The suit also claimed that the family, who are Palestinian, was denied halal food at the prison cafeteria, prenatal vitamins for Hanan, and psychological counseling. "They were treated as inmates," said attorney Joshua Bardavid, "rather than a family being held for immigration reasons."
The Ibrahims are far from the only residents to complain of ill-treatment at T. Don Hutto, where operations are run by the controversial prison staffing company Corrections Corporation of America. Lawyers with the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic, which has represented some 25 of the inmates, say several have reported weight loss and frequent vomiting, and parents have been unable to tend to sick children at night because rules ban them from leaving their cells after curfew. Other women have also complained of a lack of prenatal and mental health care. "I'm not a psychologist, but I go talk to these people, and they are just in shambles," said law fellow Frances Valdez. "I mean, they are losing their humanity." UT law professor and clinic director Barbara Hines believes imprisoning children is on its face unethical. "I've been doing this for thirty years," she said, "and I haven't been this upset about something in a very long time. It's just heartbreaking to go in there."
Leg irons. Can you imagine going to your pre-natal check-ups in fucking LEG IRONS?! Or threatening a five-year old child for not standing still during a daily head-count? Many of these people have fled really fucked-up places and are seeking asylum in this so-called land of freedom, and this is how they’re treated.
How is this different from the places and people they’re looking to us for protection from?
UPDATE
Mariachi Mama just found and posted a link to a report by the Women's Commissions for Refugees and Children which was just released this month. Worth the read for great background on this issue. Here's their press release regarding this new report...
Groundbreaking report finds significant problems with U.S. treatment of immigrant families in detention
Report Release Feb. 22, 9:30am
National Press Club, Murrow Room, 529 14 th St, NW, 13th Floor
Washington , DC
Washington, DC, February 22, 2007—Refugee advocates found prison-like conditions at the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) facilities that house immigrant families, including asylum seekers, who are in immigration proceedings. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) describe their findings in a report released today, Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families, which also lays out steps that DHS can take immediately to ensure that families in U.S. detention are treated humanely.
"As a country that supports family values, we should not be treating immigrant families who have not committed a crime like criminals, particularly children," said LIRS President Ralston H. Deffenbaugh.
The Women’s Commission and LIRS visited the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas and the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility in Pennsylvania and talked with detained families as well as former detainees and ICE officials. The delegation found families, many with young children, detained in harsh conditions, for days, months and sometimes years. These families are held in penal settings where residents are deprived of the right to live as a family unit, denied adequate medical and mental health care, and face overly harsh disciplinary tactics.
"Every woman we talked to in these facilities cried," said Michelle Brané, Director, Detention and Asylum at the Women’s Commission. "Many of the children were clearly sad and depressed. Some feared separation from their parents, a common threat used to ensure that children behaved according to facility rules. Alternatives exist that are not punitive and that keep families together while also addressing the enforcement concerns of the government. "
The detention of families expanded dramatically in 2006 with the opening of a family facility in Texas, and represents a major shift in the U.S. government’s treatment of families in immigration proceedings. LIRS and the Women’s Commission felt it was vital to examine the implications of this expanding penal approach to family detention in order to inform the development of policy and practice that serves the best interests of children and families.
The report recommends practical and viable alternatives to this criminal model as well as recommendations for the development of standards.
UPDATE 2
Ok here's something each of you can do - right now. This story's not getting much attention so it's up to us to get it in to our local papers. Start by going to this DNC site and plugging in your zip code.
http://www.democrats.org/...
It'll bring up all your local papers so you can draft a brief LTE and then it'll send your LTE to the right people - and hopefully help you get it published.