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Guest
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020907K.shtml
Print This Story
E-mail This Story
Also see below:
Immigrant Detention Blues
Home-Grown Gitmo
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Friday 09 February 2007
The Bush administration's penchant for privatizing virtually all
government operations has combined with the current furor over
border security to create another perfect storm - this time for
suspected illegal immigrants.
These thousands of people held in detention under the aegis of the
US Department of Homeland Security - increasingly in
privately-owned jails - are failing to receive timely medical
treatment and adequate food, being subjected to frequent sexual
harassment, and having their access to lawyers, relatives and
immigration authorities improperly limited.
These are among the findings of the DHS inspector general, based
on an audit of the US-owned and operated Krome Service Processing
Center in Miami, a facility in San Diego operated by the
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and local jails and
prisons in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Hudson and Passaic
counties, New Jersey.
But critics of the agency called the report disappointing,
contending that it watered down recommendations and ignored the
most serious allegations of abuse collected since June 2004, which
they said included physical beatings, medical neglect, food
shortages and mixing of illegal immigrants in administrative
custody with criminals.
Mark Dow, author of "American Gulag: Inside America's Immigration
Prisons," a scathing expose of detention facilities, goes further.
He says the Inspector General's report "has helped ensure that,
for now, the mistreatment will continue."
The reason, he says, is the IG's recommendation that the DHS
agency responsible for the detention of immigrants, the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), police itself.
"That is telling the agency responsible for the mistreatment of
its prisoners, and whose own inspections are deficient, 'ensure
that periodic oversight and inspection procedures are in place to
address compliance with the Detention Standards.' The [IG's]
report neglects to mention that ICE has refused to promulgate its
detention standards as regulations because they would then be, at
least theoretically, legally enforceable," he says.
He adds: "The bottom line is that 'auditing' without truly
independent enforcement is meaningless."
In response to the IG's report, more than a dozen national
organizations have filed a petition with the DHS to create
enforceable regulations governing detention standards. If the
federal government agrees to the request, DHS will promulgate
binding standards for the safety, health, and conditions for
thousands of detainees around the country.
These advocates, who include the American Friends Service
Committee Immigrant Rights Program, the American Civil Liberties
Union of New Jersey, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the
Seton Hall University Law Center for Social Justice, believe DHS
regulations governing detention standards will ensure effective
protection of detainees' human rights. Their petition "highlights
our unconscionable detention system. The reality is that county
governments vie for lucrative contracts with the federal
government to warehouse non-citizens without any binding standards
of care."
Among the most significant issues raised in the IG's report was
that detainees face significant hurdles when attempting to make
complaints about their conditions of confinement. It further
points to the current ineffectiveness of ICE's own annual
inspections of detention facilities. "The report exposes gaping
holes in the protection of detainee rights. We cannot trust the
jail officials to address detainees' concerns, and we cannot trust
ICE to effectively review the jails' practices."
Since 9/11, many of the detention centers for immigrants have been
privatized and are being run by such companies as CCA and
Florida-based Wackenhut. According to Corporate Watch, in 1999 the
feds farmed out less than three percent of beds - but seven years
later, the number had reached almost one in five.
The boom in privatized prisons began shortly after the 2001
terrorist attacks, when the Department of Justice rounded up
thousands of "Middle Eastern-looking" immigrants and detained many
of them for months, abusing many, treating them as criminals, and
denying them access to lawyers.
A 2003 report by the DHS Inspector General forcefully condemned
the treatment of immigrants inside various jails in its report,
"The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens
Held on Immigration Charges in Connection With the Investigation
of the September 11 Attacks." Infractions included routine abuse
of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of
health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack
of working showers and toilets.
None of those held were ever charged with a terror-related crime.
Some were deported for immigration violations.
Privatized detention facilities have grown apace amid the clamor
for a crackdown on alleged undocumented immigrants. Contracts for
these new jails flowed to the private prison industry despite many
previous allegations of mismanagement and scandal.
Detainee advocates accuse prison companies of cutting corners in
training guards and in providing basic services. The government
has done little to regulate prison administration, but has
sanctioned exploitive labor practices and rip-off telephone costs
for inmates.
For example, a former detainee in a CCA facility in San Diego
testified that "The guards would scream and shout at us as if we
were little kids. If we would ask them to stop, they would
threaten to lock us down for a few days, which would happen
constantly. Three people being locked in a two-man cell, in a 12 x
7 room. This happened a lot; sometimes as punishment for the
actions of one or two inmates, the other 105-115 detainees would
suffer."
Often, he added, "detainees would be missing money on their
accounts, which I was recently told by a detainee who keeps in
contact with me was being stolen by the staff, according to [an]
OIG investigation. We would get underserved during meal times.
When we complained to the unit manager she would say that we were
given the right amounts, which in my opinion was the appropriate
portion for a ten or eleven year old. Some of the guards and staff
would curse at us. They would purposely lower the televisions so
we couldn't hear them, just to mess with us. During our free time,
they would take their time turning on the phones so we wouldn't be
able to call our families. Just to be cruel."
CCA's revenues have increased substantially since 9/11. The
company calculates that its expenditure of $28.89 per inmate per
day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate.
The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues
to award lucrative contracts to CCA and its competitors. CCA runs
the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the
1,216-bed San Diego Correctional Facility, as well as having
landed new prison contracts with the Kentucky Department of
Corrections, the state of Kansas, and the Florida Department of
Management Services.
Wackenhut has also shared in the private prison boom. Before 2001,
Wackenhut, like CCA, had been at the center of serious
inmate-abuse scandals: Guards were caught having sex with underage
inmates, there were routine reports of extreme mistreatment of
inmates, and there was even a disproportionately high level of
deaths in their facilities.
After a CBS Television report exposed the repeated rape of a
14-year-old girl at a Wackenhut juvenile jail and two guards were
found guilty, its CEO said, "It's a tough business. The people in
prison are not Sunday-school children." Still more worrying was
Wackenhut's record with inmate-on-inmate killings. In 1998-1999
alone, Wackenhut's New Mexico facilities had a death rate of one
murder for every 400 prisoners. For the same period in all US
prisons, the rate was about one in 22,000.
Wackenhut's most public response was to change its name to the GEO
Group. It continues to win lucrative government contracts.
The corrections industry has routinely argued that privatizing
prisons dramatically lowers costs. But a 1996 US General
Accounting Office report concluded there was no clear evidence
supporting this contention.
Prison companies do have certain advantages over other
corporations: They are able to save large amounts of money on
labor practices that would be illegal under any other
circumstances. Inmate jobs in all prisons pay a pittance, but
immigrant prisons are even worse. Because DHS guidelines mandate
that non-citizen prisoners cannot earn more than $1 per day, the
company gets janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, launderers,
kitchen staff, sewers and grounds keepers at almost no cost.
Author Mark Dow says, "It isn't politically popular to speak up
for alien inmates, but Congress has a responsibility to establish
independent oversight of the ICE detention system. Congress should
hold hearings on ICE detention - with meaningful follow-up." It
should "Create a statutory-based ombudsman's office or independent
oversight body outside the Department of Homeland Security. It
must have subpoena power as well as authorization to make
unannounced inspections of all facilities holding ICE detainees."
"Eventually, the very nature of our immigration detention system
must be reexamined. We take it as a given that a visa violator, or
an asylum seeker, or a thirty-year lawful resident who has paid
taxes but committed a non-violent misdemeanor decades ago, should
be strip-searched, dressed in a prison jumpsuit, and denied
contact with her children."
Or, as summed up by Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA, "While
the US immigration system has always had its faults, it has become
much worse since the attacks of 9/11. Many of the people who enter
this country are fleeing persecution in other countries. They come
here to seek asylum. We must not confuse these victims seeking
refuge with those who would enter this country to do us harm. The
US has every right to protect its borders. However, immigration
policies must not make it harder for victims of human rights
violations to find protection in the United States. We need to
honor our country's commitment to protecting the persecuted."
The toxic brew here is a smorgasbord of a prison system without
regulations or meaningful oversight, a Congress that has been AWOL
on its abuses, a mainstream press that, with a few exceptions, has
been silent, a multi-million dollar private prison industry, an
administration eager to use it, and a prisoner population with no
votes.
With those ingredients, don't expect to hear much about America's
most secretive prison system any time soon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the
Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State
Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work
life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press
in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Immigrant Detention Blues
By Diana Welch
The Austin Chronicle
Friday 02 February 2007
In October 2001, the Ibrahim family, Palestinians seeking asylum
from life under Israeli occupation, entered the U.S. legally. The
family's requests for asylum, in which members described repeated
beatings at the hands of Israeli officials and health
complications from gas attacks in occupied territories, were
denied. According to their lawyer, John Wheat Gibson, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agents invaded the family's house after
midnight on the night of Nov. 3, 2006, and arrested everyone
inside. The entire family remains imprisoned today.
Salaheddin Ibrahim is currently separated from his family in a
prison in Haskell, Texas. Hanan, his pregnant wife, shares a cell
at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, with her
5-year-old daughter, while her 7- and 12-year-old daughters are
together in a separate cell. Her 15-year-old son is alone in
another. The Ibrahims' 3-year-old daughter, who was born since
their arrival in the U.S. and is therefore an American citizen, is
living with Salaheddin's brother, Ahmad Ibrahim, in the Dallas
area. Ahmad says the family has been told they are to be deported,
but they don't know when or to where. Applications to get them
Jordanian papers have been denied, and ICE, a branch of the
Department of Homeland Security, is apparently contacting the
Israeli embassy - the country from which the family was seeking
asylum in the first place - for papers. As it stands now, the
family will remain in custody until its members are deported. "I
just can't understand the jailing of 5 - and 7-year-olds," Ahmad
said over the phone as his 3-year-old niece's voice jabbered in
the background. "They have done nothing wrong."
The Ibrahims are just one of the families being held in a 512-bed
prison in Taylor, just northeast of Austin in Williamson County.
There's no way of verifying exactly how many families are being
held there, as Corrections Corporation of America, the private
prison company that ICE pays more than $2.8 million a month to run
the facility, is restricted by ICE from commenting on the
population. According to ICE Enforcement Officer Nina Pruneda, a
population breakdown cannot be released to the public due to - you
guessed it - "reasons of homeland security."
This much is known: As a result of 1996 immigration-law amendments
that mandated the detention of certain immigrants and asylum
seekers, ICE now detains more than 200,000 people annually at more
than 300 sites, most of which are county jails. Immigration
detainees make up the fastest-growing group of people incarcerated
in the U.S. and, according to many critics of the burgeoning
private detention industry, one of the fastest-growing ways to
make a buck.
The agreement between ICE, CCA, and Williamson Co. is as follows:
ICE pays CCA $2.8 million per month for up to 512 prisoners (plus
$19.23 per hour for off-site guard services, $125,000 per month
for medical care, and contraceptives, immunizations, and off-site
medical care billed at additional cost). On top of that, ICE pays
$79 per day extra per head plus $8 for medical care. Meanwhile, as
part of its Intergovernmental Service Agreement with CCA, the
county collects $1 per prisoner (child or adult) on a monthly
basis - a total of up to $500 a month, in theory. A growing
grassroots movement has been staging vigils and protests to try to
shut down what it calls the Hutto prison camp; they were focused
on this month because the county's contract with CCA was set to
expire Jan. 31 (though in April 2006, Williamson Co. commissioners
approved the prison contract with ICE "indefinitely unless
terminated in writing" with 120 days notice).
As word of the incarceration of "noncriminal alien families"
(ICE's term) spreads, the number of outraged citizens grows. "We
just didn't know about it," said Williamson Co. resident Jane Van
Praag. "When we heard what was going on and did a little research,
it turned out that what sounded pretty bad was really bad." Van
Praag drafted a letter to the Williamson County Commissioners
Court, which she read aloud to the commissioners at a recent
meeting, asking that they not renew their contract with the
Tennessee-based CCA. In her letter, she pointed to Congress'
mandate (in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations
Bill) that the DHS exhaust all other alternatives to detention,
such as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. "I urge the
Commissioners Court to hold ICE accountable and request that ICE
prove it is complying with what Congress intended," Van Praag
implored the Commissioners Court. "We need to know if ICE has
exhausted all of the alternatives to detaining these children and
families before you renew this contract."
Led by Texans United for Families, an umbrella organization made
up of advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union,
Grassroots Leadership Initiative, League of United Latin American
Citizens, and Texas Civil Rights Project, a relatively small group
of people is working to ensure that the plight of families in the
T. Don Hutto prison is not forgotten. TUFF organized a third vigil
on Jan. 25 at the facility, to encourage the court to heed their
demands. Twenty-five people, including Van Praag, ACLU members,
and neighbors who live directly across the railroad tracks from
the facility, gathered with lit candles and signs demanding an end
to the imprisonment of children. "We have gone to the [court]; we
have presented them with all the information that we have," said
Jay J. Castro Sr., one of TUFF's most vocal organizers. "If they
still choose to renew the contract, we will not give up. Our
outrage will only grow stronger."
Indeed on Jan. 30, the Commissioners Court decided to renew the
contract with CCA for another two years, revising it to allow for
termination at any time and adding that CCA "shall provide
education in accordance with all state and federal education
standards and guidelines to any child housed at the facility." The
Commissioners Court also pointed out that, during this first year
of the contract, CCA has made improvements and changes in "order
to better accommodate the families during their stay while
awaiting the outcome of their immigration hearings or return to
their home countries," including a contract with Lone Star Circle
of Care for ob-gyn care and a menu that reflects "cultural and
medical needs and diets."
"As a result of the protests and related media attention, the
conditions in the facility have changed," says ACLU's Rebecca
Bernhardt, who has toured the facility. "We know that the
education, in particular, has received a major overhaul. Children
are now receiving four hours of education a day, instead of just
one hour." But Bernhardt is quick to point out that while these
recent changes are good, they're not enough. "It's the lipstick on
the pig problem," she says. "No matter how humane they make Hutto,
the question still remains: Is it acceptable for the United States
to imprison children, criminal or non? No, it's not. These
families shouldn't be in prison."
-------
| t r u t h o u t |
Print This Story
E-mail This Story
Also see below:
Immigrant Detention Blues
Home-Grown Gitmo
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Friday 09 February 2007
The Bush administration's penchant for privatizing virtually all
government operations has combined with the current furor over
border security to create another perfect storm - this time for
suspected illegal immigrants.
These thousands of people held in detention under the aegis of the
US Department of Homeland Security - increasingly in
privately-owned jails - are failing to receive timely medical
treatment and adequate food, being subjected to frequent sexual
harassment, and having their access to lawyers, relatives and
immigration authorities improperly limited.
These are among the findings of the DHS inspector general, based
on an audit of the US-owned and operated Krome Service Processing
Center in Miami, a facility in San Diego operated by the
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and local jails and
prisons in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Hudson and Passaic
counties, New Jersey.
But critics of the agency called the report disappointing,
contending that it watered down recommendations and ignored the
most serious allegations of abuse collected since June 2004, which
they said included physical beatings, medical neglect, food
shortages and mixing of illegal immigrants in administrative
custody with criminals.
Mark Dow, author of "American Gulag: Inside America's Immigration
Prisons," a scathing expose of detention facilities, goes further.
He says the Inspector General's report "has helped ensure that,
for now, the mistreatment will continue."
The reason, he says, is the IG's recommendation that the DHS
agency responsible for the detention of immigrants, the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), police itself.
"That is telling the agency responsible for the mistreatment of
its prisoners, and whose own inspections are deficient, 'ensure
that periodic oversight and inspection procedures are in place to
address compliance with the Detention Standards.' The [IG's]
report neglects to mention that ICE has refused to promulgate its
detention standards as regulations because they would then be, at
least theoretically, legally enforceable," he says.
He adds: "The bottom line is that 'auditing' without truly
independent enforcement is meaningless."
In response to the IG's report, more than a dozen national
organizations have filed a petition with the DHS to create
enforceable regulations governing detention standards. If the
federal government agrees to the request, DHS will promulgate
binding standards for the safety, health, and conditions for
thousands of detainees around the country.
These advocates, who include the American Friends Service
Committee Immigrant Rights Program, the American Civil Liberties
Union of New Jersey, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the
Seton Hall University Law Center for Social Justice, believe DHS
regulations governing detention standards will ensure effective
protection of detainees' human rights. Their petition "highlights
our unconscionable detention system. The reality is that county
governments vie for lucrative contracts with the federal
government to warehouse non-citizens without any binding standards
of care."
Among the most significant issues raised in the IG's report was
that detainees face significant hurdles when attempting to make
complaints about their conditions of confinement. It further
points to the current ineffectiveness of ICE's own annual
inspections of detention facilities. "The report exposes gaping
holes in the protection of detainee rights. We cannot trust the
jail officials to address detainees' concerns, and we cannot trust
ICE to effectively review the jails' practices."
Since 9/11, many of the detention centers for immigrants have been
privatized and are being run by such companies as CCA and
Florida-based Wackenhut. According to Corporate Watch, in 1999 the
feds farmed out less than three percent of beds - but seven years
later, the number had reached almost one in five.
The boom in privatized prisons began shortly after the 2001
terrorist attacks, when the Department of Justice rounded up
thousands of "Middle Eastern-looking" immigrants and detained many
of them for months, abusing many, treating them as criminals, and
denying them access to lawyers.
A 2003 report by the DHS Inspector General forcefully condemned
the treatment of immigrants inside various jails in its report,
"The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens
Held on Immigration Charges in Connection With the Investigation
of the September 11 Attacks." Infractions included routine abuse
of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of
health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack
of working showers and toilets.
None of those held were ever charged with a terror-related crime.
Some were deported for immigration violations.
Privatized detention facilities have grown apace amid the clamor
for a crackdown on alleged undocumented immigrants. Contracts for
these new jails flowed to the private prison industry despite many
previous allegations of mismanagement and scandal.
Detainee advocates accuse prison companies of cutting corners in
training guards and in providing basic services. The government
has done little to regulate prison administration, but has
sanctioned exploitive labor practices and rip-off telephone costs
for inmates.
For example, a former detainee in a CCA facility in San Diego
testified that "The guards would scream and shout at us as if we
were little kids. If we would ask them to stop, they would
threaten to lock us down for a few days, which would happen
constantly. Three people being locked in a two-man cell, in a 12 x
7 room. This happened a lot; sometimes as punishment for the
actions of one or two inmates, the other 105-115 detainees would
suffer."
Often, he added, "detainees would be missing money on their
accounts, which I was recently told by a detainee who keeps in
contact with me was being stolen by the staff, according to [an]
OIG investigation. We would get underserved during meal times.
When we complained to the unit manager she would say that we were
given the right amounts, which in my opinion was the appropriate
portion for a ten or eleven year old. Some of the guards and staff
would curse at us. They would purposely lower the televisions so
we couldn't hear them, just to mess with us. During our free time,
they would take their time turning on the phones so we wouldn't be
able to call our families. Just to be cruel."
CCA's revenues have increased substantially since 9/11. The
company calculates that its expenditure of $28.89 per inmate per
day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate.
The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues
to award lucrative contracts to CCA and its competitors. CCA runs
the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the
1,216-bed San Diego Correctional Facility, as well as having
landed new prison contracts with the Kentucky Department of
Corrections, the state of Kansas, and the Florida Department of
Management Services.
Wackenhut has also shared in the private prison boom. Before 2001,
Wackenhut, like CCA, had been at the center of serious
inmate-abuse scandals: Guards were caught having sex with underage
inmates, there were routine reports of extreme mistreatment of
inmates, and there was even a disproportionately high level of
deaths in their facilities.
After a CBS Television report exposed the repeated rape of a
14-year-old girl at a Wackenhut juvenile jail and two guards were
found guilty, its CEO said, "It's a tough business. The people in
prison are not Sunday-school children." Still more worrying was
Wackenhut's record with inmate-on-inmate killings. In 1998-1999
alone, Wackenhut's New Mexico facilities had a death rate of one
murder for every 400 prisoners. For the same period in all US
prisons, the rate was about one in 22,000.
Wackenhut's most public response was to change its name to the GEO
Group. It continues to win lucrative government contracts.
The corrections industry has routinely argued that privatizing
prisons dramatically lowers costs. But a 1996 US General
Accounting Office report concluded there was no clear evidence
supporting this contention.
Prison companies do have certain advantages over other
corporations: They are able to save large amounts of money on
labor practices that would be illegal under any other
circumstances. Inmate jobs in all prisons pay a pittance, but
immigrant prisons are even worse. Because DHS guidelines mandate
that non-citizen prisoners cannot earn more than $1 per day, the
company gets janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, launderers,
kitchen staff, sewers and grounds keepers at almost no cost.
Author Mark Dow says, "It isn't politically popular to speak up
for alien inmates, but Congress has a responsibility to establish
independent oversight of the ICE detention system. Congress should
hold hearings on ICE detention - with meaningful follow-up." It
should "Create a statutory-based ombudsman's office or independent
oversight body outside the Department of Homeland Security. It
must have subpoena power as well as authorization to make
unannounced inspections of all facilities holding ICE detainees."
"Eventually, the very nature of our immigration detention system
must be reexamined. We take it as a given that a visa violator, or
an asylum seeker, or a thirty-year lawful resident who has paid
taxes but committed a non-violent misdemeanor decades ago, should
be strip-searched, dressed in a prison jumpsuit, and denied
contact with her children."
Or, as summed up by Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA, "While
the US immigration system has always had its faults, it has become
much worse since the attacks of 9/11. Many of the people who enter
this country are fleeing persecution in other countries. They come
here to seek asylum. We must not confuse these victims seeking
refuge with those who would enter this country to do us harm. The
US has every right to protect its borders. However, immigration
policies must not make it harder for victims of human rights
violations to find protection in the United States. We need to
honor our country's commitment to protecting the persecuted."
The toxic brew here is a smorgasbord of a prison system without
regulations or meaningful oversight, a Congress that has been AWOL
on its abuses, a mainstream press that, with a few exceptions, has
been silent, a multi-million dollar private prison industry, an
administration eager to use it, and a prisoner population with no
votes.
With those ingredients, don't expect to hear much about America's
most secretive prison system any time soon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the
Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State
Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work
life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press
in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Immigrant Detention Blues
By Diana Welch
The Austin Chronicle
Friday 02 February 2007
In October 2001, the Ibrahim family, Palestinians seeking asylum
from life under Israeli occupation, entered the U.S. legally. The
family's requests for asylum, in which members described repeated
beatings at the hands of Israeli officials and health
complications from gas attacks in occupied territories, were
denied. According to their lawyer, John Wheat Gibson, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agents invaded the family's house after
midnight on the night of Nov. 3, 2006, and arrested everyone
inside. The entire family remains imprisoned today.
Salaheddin Ibrahim is currently separated from his family in a
prison in Haskell, Texas. Hanan, his pregnant wife, shares a cell
at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, with her
5-year-old daughter, while her 7- and 12-year-old daughters are
together in a separate cell. Her 15-year-old son is alone in
another. The Ibrahims' 3-year-old daughter, who was born since
their arrival in the U.S. and is therefore an American citizen, is
living with Salaheddin's brother, Ahmad Ibrahim, in the Dallas
area. Ahmad says the family has been told they are to be deported,
but they don't know when or to where. Applications to get them
Jordanian papers have been denied, and ICE, a branch of the
Department of Homeland Security, is apparently contacting the
Israeli embassy - the country from which the family was seeking
asylum in the first place - for papers. As it stands now, the
family will remain in custody until its members are deported. "I
just can't understand the jailing of 5 - and 7-year-olds," Ahmad
said over the phone as his 3-year-old niece's voice jabbered in
the background. "They have done nothing wrong."
The Ibrahims are just one of the families being held in a 512-bed
prison in Taylor, just northeast of Austin in Williamson County.
There's no way of verifying exactly how many families are being
held there, as Corrections Corporation of America, the private
prison company that ICE pays more than $2.8 million a month to run
the facility, is restricted by ICE from commenting on the
population. According to ICE Enforcement Officer Nina Pruneda, a
population breakdown cannot be released to the public due to - you
guessed it - "reasons of homeland security."
This much is known: As a result of 1996 immigration-law amendments
that mandated the detention of certain immigrants and asylum
seekers, ICE now detains more than 200,000 people annually at more
than 300 sites, most of which are county jails. Immigration
detainees make up the fastest-growing group of people incarcerated
in the U.S. and, according to many critics of the burgeoning
private detention industry, one of the fastest-growing ways to
make a buck.
The agreement between ICE, CCA, and Williamson Co. is as follows:
ICE pays CCA $2.8 million per month for up to 512 prisoners (plus
$19.23 per hour for off-site guard services, $125,000 per month
for medical care, and contraceptives, immunizations, and off-site
medical care billed at additional cost). On top of that, ICE pays
$79 per day extra per head plus $8 for medical care. Meanwhile, as
part of its Intergovernmental Service Agreement with CCA, the
county collects $1 per prisoner (child or adult) on a monthly
basis - a total of up to $500 a month, in theory. A growing
grassroots movement has been staging vigils and protests to try to
shut down what it calls the Hutto prison camp; they were focused
on this month because the county's contract with CCA was set to
expire Jan. 31 (though in April 2006, Williamson Co. commissioners
approved the prison contract with ICE "indefinitely unless
terminated in writing" with 120 days notice).
As word of the incarceration of "noncriminal alien families"
(ICE's term) spreads, the number of outraged citizens grows. "We
just didn't know about it," said Williamson Co. resident Jane Van
Praag. "When we heard what was going on and did a little research,
it turned out that what sounded pretty bad was really bad." Van
Praag drafted a letter to the Williamson County Commissioners
Court, which she read aloud to the commissioners at a recent
meeting, asking that they not renew their contract with the
Tennessee-based CCA. In her letter, she pointed to Congress'
mandate (in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations
Bill) that the DHS exhaust all other alternatives to detention,
such as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. "I urge the
Commissioners Court to hold ICE accountable and request that ICE
prove it is complying with what Congress intended," Van Praag
implored the Commissioners Court. "We need to know if ICE has
exhausted all of the alternatives to detaining these children and
families before you renew this contract."
Led by Texans United for Families, an umbrella organization made
up of advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union,
Grassroots Leadership Initiative, League of United Latin American
Citizens, and Texas Civil Rights Project, a relatively small group
of people is working to ensure that the plight of families in the
T. Don Hutto prison is not forgotten. TUFF organized a third vigil
on Jan. 25 at the facility, to encourage the court to heed their
demands. Twenty-five people, including Van Praag, ACLU members,
and neighbors who live directly across the railroad tracks from
the facility, gathered with lit candles and signs demanding an end
to the imprisonment of children. "We have gone to the [court]; we
have presented them with all the information that we have," said
Jay J. Castro Sr., one of TUFF's most vocal organizers. "If they
still choose to renew the contract, we will not give up. Our
outrage will only grow stronger."
Indeed on Jan. 30, the Commissioners Court decided to renew the
contract with CCA for another two years, revising it to allow for
termination at any time and adding that CCA "shall provide
education in accordance with all state and federal education
standards and guidelines to any child housed at the facility." The
Commissioners Court also pointed out that, during this first year
of the contract, CCA has made improvements and changes in "order
to better accommodate the families during their stay while
awaiting the outcome of their immigration hearings or return to
their home countries," including a contract with Lone Star Circle
of Care for ob-gyn care and a menu that reflects "cultural and
medical needs and diets."
"As a result of the protests and related media attention, the
conditions in the facility have changed," says ACLU's Rebecca
Bernhardt, who has toured the facility. "We know that the
education, in particular, has received a major overhaul. Children
are now receiving four hours of education a day, instead of just
one hour." But Bernhardt is quick to point out that while these
recent changes are good, they're not enough. "It's the lipstick on
the pig problem," she says. "No matter how humane they make Hutto,
the question still remains: Is it acceptable for the United States
to imprison children, criminal or non? No, it's not. These
families shouldn't be in prison."
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