Does this look like a place to raise a family?Starting in 2006, Homeland Security and ICE thought it was a good idea to put asylum seeking, non-criminal immigrant families in a facility that was formerly a prison, and use a private prison company to run it. According to a recent New York Times article:
Doors were to remain open during the day, but they were wired with laser-detection alarms that were triggered when anyone came or went at night. A 2007 report by two advocacy groups noted that if a child sleeping in a separate cell woke up at night and went looking for his parents the alarm would sound, and only C.C.A. staff members were allowed to respond.
Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs.
This is really bad
The guards at Hutto conducted as many as seven head counts a day, during which all detainees, even toddlers, were supposed to remain in place, usually by their beds, for as long as it took to complete the count. In practice, this meant that detainees might be in their cells twelve hours a day. Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made “six or seven requests,” and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl “smelled of urine.”
The staff at this facility primarily don't have a background in child welfare, they have a background in corrections. The facility is in Taylor, Texas and in the fall of last year the state of Texas decided to renew the contract on this privately run immigrant detention center. Apparently there is video from the hearing on this contract at the Williamson County Commissioner's Court where Commisioner Cynthia Long explains "The conditions in this facility are lightyears better than where many of these people have come from" and "The thing that we forget is that their parents have broken the law and unfortunately as children we have to suffer with the sins of our parents"
photos and video from Hutto Journal
found via Feministe and Female Impersonator
5 comments:
Nice blog. and, yes, hutto is horriffic. i hear that they have improved the facility slightly--after the suit by the ACLU.
have you seen the hutto blog. there is a video there: tdonhutto.blogspot.com/
Thanks!
No I haven't seen the hutto blog until now, but I'm glad so many people are protesting. Why isn't this in the news more?
I work for a separate agency as a social worker providing for the mental health/counseling needs of the detainees of this facility since it started getting the immigrant population. So I've been inside there with full access for almost two years now. But because I work for an outside agency, it doesn't matter to me whether the contract continues or not, I'll keep right on working, just at a different job site.
So if I may present a view simply as an informed person with a heart and morals... the things that you're posting on this site that have been deliberately dispersed across the internet are propoganda that was put out for the purpose of achieving legal goals. The lawsuit that you heard about from the ACLU only asked for the remedy of the release of a group of people. The people were naturally released anyway as their time came, then the ACLU dropped the lawsuit and posted on their own website that conditions have "significantly improved". (but of course "slightly" is a better term for rousing people)
The people inside that facility live better than my own family.
If you're going to try to have a discussion about the political aspect of detention of families, fine, do that honestly and don't try to interject a discussion about "conditions". To try to bring in BS story-time from all reaches of the internet's imagination, all referenced back to other "advocacy group" sites isn't helpful. In the morality of an "advocacy group" person, it makes perfect sense to spread a known non-truth if it acheives the main objective, in this case, releasing people that are under court order to be detained.
There's not a single locked door in that building, as a matter of fact they could walk right out the front door if they want. That silly mention of a laser system on the doors is less sophisicated than the laser system on the door of a 7 11. In the 7 11, at least it dings when you walk in, at that facility, it just makes a light change colors on the control board. The caption under the 3 year old picture back when that was still a prison and there was barbed wire, that's the loading dock where the garbage trucks come in. Of course that's not a good place to raise a child, you can't even see the building in that picture. Families stay there a month or a month and a half, most of us had at least that much of a crappy time period in our childhood.
And the comment form Cynthia Long at the bottom of the article? The part that's left out is that Cyntia Long lived for years in the same central american countries that these immigrants came here from, trying to improve the lives and opportunities of poor people and she has toured the facility more than once. I'd say that she's more than in a good position to make a judgement call about the conditions in that facility compared to the conditions in the countries that they came from.
Like I said, if you want to say that they shouldn't be detained, do it. Just don't say that they're being treated poorly because people who have much to gain from saying such a thing are telling you that it's the case.
salvadorano,
"if you want to say that they shouldn't be detained, do it. Just don't say that they're being treated poorly because people who have much to gain from saying such a thing are telling you that it's the case."
Have you seen the video on the hutto blog? there are interviews with people (some of them children) that were held at hutto. What do these children have to gain by complaining that they were not fed enough? that they were not let outside? do you think they were lying? what about the rape case?
I've spoken to people who were imprisoned in hutto and other Corrections Corporation of America facilities and hutto is not a residential center, it isn't even a prison, it's a concentration camp. that's what you call facilities where toddlers lose significant amounts of weight due to malnutrican and are threatened to be separated from their mothers if they cry and arn't allowed outside unless a guard says so.
maybe you should read the suit that the ACLU filed? did you really go to theie website?
http://www.aclu.org/immigrants/detention/hutto.html
most families don't have to spend upwards of 12 hours in a jail cell.
The only people that have a lot to gain in this issue is Corrections Corporation of America who makes billions off of imprisoning people--in this case children as young as two.
Yes I've seen all of the videos, and I know that everyone in those videos is represented by the same set of pro bono attorneys. They trade their participation in the videos for legal representation. So while well under 1% of the population of that facility has had their immigration cases handled by the UT Immigration Clinic, almost 100% of the former detainees that you've seen in videos have been represented by that clinic. (I say almost because attorney John Wheat Gibson out of Dallas called up the news to put his Palestinian clients on tv.) And none of those clients appear in any videos after their case has found final resolution. So what do they have to gain? They have their only chance to stay in this country to gain.
There has never been a time at that facility that every man, woman, and child didn't have access to unlimited fruit, juices, milk, and other snacks around the clock in addition to 3 hot meals a day. You couple that with the fact that they get to see a doctor the same day they ask for one (can you do that for your kids?) and I wonder what else can realistically be done if people are HONESTLY losing weight there?
I don't need to read the suit that the ACLU filed, I spoke to the plaintiffs daily throughout that entire ordeal, moreover I still talk to some of them. It was all legal maneuvering, they got the clients released, and you haven't heard a single thing from the ACLU since then. So things must not be THAT bad or they'd still be filing lawsuits against DHS.
As far as CCA gaining from the situation, that's true. But I don't think I can be mad at them, if it wasn't them it would be someone else.
As I've said, say that families with children shouldn't be detained, I might agree with you. Just don't bring up propoganda that was spread by the ACLU media whores almost a year ago to enrage everyone as a basis for your belief of current or even past conditions there.
Post a Comment