""I feel much better, I feel tranquil, I can do things now I couldn’t do there. I am trying to forget everything about Hutto. I feel free. It was a nightmare."
That's what ACLU client, 12-year-old Andrea Restrepo of Colombia, said after she was released from the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor. Andrea had been held in the facility, with her mother and 9-year-old sister, for nearly one year.
Today, the ACLU announced a settlement of their lawsuit against the Hutto Immigrant Family Detention Center in Texas and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). No matter how one feels about immigration, the conditions in this center and the detention of inncocent children in prison-like conditions was and is deplorable.
Because of the lawsuit and as conditions of the settlement, conditions in the detention center have and will at least improve (more after the fold).
The settlement is the result of extensive litigation and mediation in consolidated lawsuits filed earlier this year against Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and six officials from ICE on behalf of 26 immigrant children. The children are between the ages of 1 and 17, and were detained at Hutto with their parents who, in almost all cases, were awaiting determinations on their asylum claims. The ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic, and the international law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP brought the lawsuits.
All 26 of the children have now been released.
Other conditions that have improved at Hutto because of the suit:
- Children no longer have to wear prison uniforms.
- Children are allowed more time outdoors.
- More education for the children is now being provided.
- Guards are no longer allowed to discipline children by threatening to separate them from their parents.
Additional improvements ICE will be required to make as a result of the settlement include allowing children over the age of 12 to move freely about the facility; providing a full-time, on-site pediatrician; eliminating the count system so that families are not forced to stay in their cells 12 hours a day; installing privacy curtains around toilets; offering field trip opportunities to children; supplying more toys and age-and language-appropriate books; and improving the nutritional value of food. ICE must also allow regular legal orientation presentations by local immigrants’ rights organizations; allow family and friends to visit Hutto detainees seven days a week; and allow children to keep paper and pens in their rooms. ICE’s compliance with each of these reforms, as well as other conditions reforms, will be subject to external oversight to ensure their permanence.
Also as result of the lawsuit, ICE has began allowing bond for families who came to the U.S. seeking asylum and established "credible fear" of returning to their home countries, allowing them to longer be held within the facility while their asylum cases are processed.
"Imprisoning families who have fled their home countries under fear of persecution from their own governments, and detaining them in jail-like conditions, was an indescribable trauma for many of the children we represented," said Barbara Hines, Director of the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
http://www.aclu.org/...
While I still find holding children in a prison just un-American and the ACLU is calling on Congress to force ICE to find alternate methods for dealing with immigrant families, great kudos to all of those who worked so hard to bring about these improved conditions and gain a bit of justice for these kids.