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Families Behind Bars: Jailing
Children of Immigrants
February 22, 2007
By Kari Lydersen
Thanks to U.S. immigration policy,
children (including infants and toddlers) whose parents are in
immigration courts, are being locked up at detention centers.
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.
The inmates are immigrants or
children of immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. Many of
them are in the process of applying for political asylum, refugees
from violence-plagued and impoverished countries like Honduras,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Somalia and Palestine. (Since there are
different procedures for Mexican immigrants, the facility houses no
Mexicans.)
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."
But as a result of increasingly
stringent immigration enforcement policies, today more than 22,000
undocumented immigrants are being detained, up from 6,785 in 1995,
according to the Congressional Research Service.
Normally, men and women are
detained separately and minors, if they are detained at all, live in
residential facilities with social services and schools. But under
the auspices of "keeping families together," children and parents
are incarcerated together at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, as
it is now called, and at a smaller facility in Berks County, Penn.
Attorneys for detainees say the children are only allowed one hour
of schooling, in English, and one hour of recreation per day.
"It's just a concentration camp by
another name," says John Wheat Gibson, a Dallas attorney
representing two Palestinian families in the facility.
In addition, there have been
reports of inadequate healthcare and nutrition.
"The kids are getting sick from the
food," says Frances Valdez, a fellow at the University of Texas Law
School's Immigration Law Clinic. "It could be a psychological thing
also. These are little kids, given only one hour of playtime a day,
the rest of the time they're in their pods in a contained area.
There are only a few people per cell so families are separated at
night. 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. One client was pregnant and we
established there was virtually no prenatal care."
When local staff for the League of
United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) collected toys for the
children at Christmas, Hutto administrators would not allow stuffed
animals to be given to the children, according to LULAC national
president Rosa Rosales.
"That's what these children need --
something warm to hug," she says. "And they won't even allow them
that, why, I can't imagine. They say they're doing a favor by
keeping families together, but this is ridiculous."
A CCA spokesperson refers media to
the San Antonio office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),
but that office did not return calls for this story.
Immigrants have been housed at the
facility since last summer, and public outrage and attention from
human rights groups has grown in the past few months as more people
have become aware of the situation.
In mid-December, Jay J.
Johnson-Castro, a 60-year-old resident of Del Rio, Texas, walked 35
miles from the Capitol to the detention center, joined by activists
along the way and ending in a vigil at the center.
"Everyone I have talked to about
this is shocked that here on American soil we are treating helpless
mothers and innocent children as prisoners," says Johnson-Castro,
who had previously walked 205 miles along the border to protest the
proposed border wall. "This flies in the face of everything we claim
to represent internationally."
A coalition of attorneys, community
organizations and immigrants rights groups called Texans United for
Families is working to close the facility. The University of Texas
Immigration Law Clinic is considering a lawsuit challenging the
incarceration of children.
Valdez sees the center as a
political statement by the government.
"Our country likes to detain
people," says Valdez. "I think it's backlash for the protests that
happened in the spring -- like, 'We're going to show you that you're
not that powerful.' It's about power."
Kari Lydersen writes for the
Washington Post out of the Midwest bureau and just published a book,
Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in
the Global Age.
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