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U.S. Gives Tour of Family Detention Center That Critics Liken to a Prison
Navy 'fatigues' available for the kids.
US. gov paying the company a dollar a day for each of these people.
The barbed wire, says a government spokesperson is to protect the people because they don't know English.
Permalink
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: February 10, 2007
NY Times
TAYLOR, Tex., Feb. 9 — Responding to complaints about conditions at the nation’s main family detention center for illegal immigrants, officials threw open the gates on Friday for a first news media tour.
Charles Reed/Department of Homeland Security, via Associated Press
Detainees wear uniforms that officials compared to scrubs.
They portrayed the privately run converted prison, open since May, as a model facility “primarily focused on the safety of the children.”
Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”
Among other things, critics have complained about the prisonlike conditions, the food and the limited amount of schooling and recreation provided for children.
Inside the fluorescent-lighted corridors, plastic plants had been hurriedly installed and some areas repainted, lawyers for some detainees said, and officials acknowledged that pizza was on the lunch menu for the first time. The detainees could not be interviewed.
The facility, the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, is operated for the government by the Corrections Corporation of America, under a $2.8-million-a-month contract with Williamson County. It is named for a founder of the company, which runs 64 facilities in 19 states.
It now holds about 400 illegal immigrants, including 170 children, in family groups from nearly 30 countries, Mr. Mead said. He called it a humane alternative to splitting up families while insuring their presence at legal proceedings.
There is only one other family detention center in the country, the smaller Berks Family Shelter Care Facility, a former nursing home, in Leesport, Pa.
Critics said the picture presented on Friday conflicted with what they had observed.
“At Hutto, we found prisonlike conditions imposed on families with no criminal background, including asylum seekers,” said Michelle Brané, a lawyer for the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service who co-authored a report on family detention to be released on Feb. 22.
Barbara Hines, clinical professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who runs an immigration clinic and has visited clients inside, said Friday that “I don’t think children should be incarcerated at all.”
The law required the government to hold families in the least restrictive conditions possible, Ms. Hines said, adding, “I was shocked, and I have been doing this 30 years.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has also been studying conditions as it considers filing a lawsuit contending that the government was violating a 1997 settlement on the treatment of detained juveniles.
“To call it a family residential center is to mask what’s going on,” said Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. “They may be cleaning up conditions, but at the end of the day it still begs the question of why they are using such a Draconian system.”
Another A.C.L.U. lawyer, Lisa Graybill, legal director, said after visiting, “I can’t describe how depressed people are in there.”
Outside the blocky buildings with thin slit windows, protesters from a local group called Texans United for Families held up signs saying, “Don’t Jail Children for Profit.”
“If they can put an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart so she doesn’t run off to Jamaica,” said a protester, Jose Ortan, a computer technician, “they can find ways to do it for immigrant families.”
Some of the harshest criticism of the center came last week from members of a Palestinian family held there for three months for overstaying a visa. They were released after an immigration appeals board unexpectedly reopened their plea for amnesty based on new conditions — danger from the Hamas takeover in the Palestinian territories.
Hamzeh Ibrahim, 15, said his father was sent to a facility in West Texas while his pregnant mother shared a cell-like room with the family’s 5-year-old girl; two other girls, 7 and 13, shared another room. He said they had to clean their rooms and the communal shower. “I cleaned for me and my mom because she is pregnant and her back hurt,” he said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who traveled from Washington to lead the tour with company staff members showed off one of the 11 dormitory areas, or pods, lined by bare pastel-tinted detainee rooms, each with a metal bunk bed, a sink and a toilet.
The rooms are not locked at night, but a laser beam alerts guards if anyone leaves a room after bedtime — 9 p.m. for children and 10 for adults. The detainees wear outfits of green and blue, which Danny Coronado, a spokesman for the corrections company, likened to scrubs but critics described as prison garb.
Officials say stays at the center are now averaging a little more than a month.
In the dining area, which has plastic tables with stools attached, Mr. Mead said, “All of our meals are planned by dietitians with calories of 3,200 a day, 3,500 for children.”
Disputing claims by some lawyers that many detainees had lost weight there, Dr. Leroy T. Soto, the chief physician on duty, said a study had actually documented weight gains. There is a medical staff of 20.
Lawyers said detainees were rushed through meals in 15 or 20 minutes. Mr. Mead acknowledged “they can’t linger,” but said it was because of classes or other activities.
Showing off a classroom with computers, Jean Bellinger, assistant administrator for programs, said children were divided into three age groups comparable to elementary, middle and high school for four hours’ a day of instruction plus an hour’s recreation and lunch. But she acknowledged that for several months a staff shortage limited class time to an hour a day.
That was far too little, said Scott Medlock, a prison rights lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting from Dallas.
More Articles in National »
====
Austin Chronicle, Feb 2, 2007
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:441523
Immigrant Detention Blues
BY DIANA WELCH
Protesters outside the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor call for the release of an unknown number of "noncriminal alien families" incarcerated within.
Photo By Jana Birchum
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."
Navy 'fatigues' available for the kids.
US. gov paying the company a dollar a day for each of these people.
The barbed wire, says a government spokesperson is to protect the people because they don't know English.
Permalink
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: February 10, 2007
NY Times
TAYLOR, Tex., Feb. 9 — Responding to complaints about conditions at the nation’s main family detention center for illegal immigrants, officials threw open the gates on Friday for a first news media tour.
Charles Reed/Department of Homeland Security, via Associated Press
Detainees wear uniforms that officials compared to scrubs.
They portrayed the privately run converted prison, open since May, as a model facility “primarily focused on the safety of the children.”
Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”
Among other things, critics have complained about the prisonlike conditions, the food and the limited amount of schooling and recreation provided for children.
Inside the fluorescent-lighted corridors, plastic plants had been hurriedly installed and some areas repainted, lawyers for some detainees said, and officials acknowledged that pizza was on the lunch menu for the first time. The detainees could not be interviewed.
The facility, the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, is operated for the government by the Corrections Corporation of America, under a $2.8-million-a-month contract with Williamson County. It is named for a founder of the company, which runs 64 facilities in 19 states.
It now holds about 400 illegal immigrants, including 170 children, in family groups from nearly 30 countries, Mr. Mead said. He called it a humane alternative to splitting up families while insuring their presence at legal proceedings.
There is only one other family detention center in the country, the smaller Berks Family Shelter Care Facility, a former nursing home, in Leesport, Pa.
Critics said the picture presented on Friday conflicted with what they had observed.
“At Hutto, we found prisonlike conditions imposed on families with no criminal background, including asylum seekers,” said Michelle Brané, a lawyer for the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service who co-authored a report on family detention to be released on Feb. 22.
Barbara Hines, clinical professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who runs an immigration clinic and has visited clients inside, said Friday that “I don’t think children should be incarcerated at all.”
The law required the government to hold families in the least restrictive conditions possible, Ms. Hines said, adding, “I was shocked, and I have been doing this 30 years.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has also been studying conditions as it considers filing a lawsuit contending that the government was violating a 1997 settlement on the treatment of detained juveniles.
“To call it a family residential center is to mask what’s going on,” said Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. “They may be cleaning up conditions, but at the end of the day it still begs the question of why they are using such a Draconian system.”
Another A.C.L.U. lawyer, Lisa Graybill, legal director, said after visiting, “I can’t describe how depressed people are in there.”
Outside the blocky buildings with thin slit windows, protesters from a local group called Texans United for Families held up signs saying, “Don’t Jail Children for Profit.”
“If they can put an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart so she doesn’t run off to Jamaica,” said a protester, Jose Ortan, a computer technician, “they can find ways to do it for immigrant families.”
Some of the harshest criticism of the center came last week from members of a Palestinian family held there for three months for overstaying a visa. They were released after an immigration appeals board unexpectedly reopened their plea for amnesty based on new conditions — danger from the Hamas takeover in the Palestinian territories.
Hamzeh Ibrahim, 15, said his father was sent to a facility in West Texas while his pregnant mother shared a cell-like room with the family’s 5-year-old girl; two other girls, 7 and 13, shared another room. He said they had to clean their rooms and the communal shower. “I cleaned for me and my mom because she is pregnant and her back hurt,” he said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who traveled from Washington to lead the tour with company staff members showed off one of the 11 dormitory areas, or pods, lined by bare pastel-tinted detainee rooms, each with a metal bunk bed, a sink and a toilet.
The rooms are not locked at night, but a laser beam alerts guards if anyone leaves a room after bedtime — 9 p.m. for children and 10 for adults. The detainees wear outfits of green and blue, which Danny Coronado, a spokesman for the corrections company, likened to scrubs but critics described as prison garb.
Officials say stays at the center are now averaging a little more than a month.
In the dining area, which has plastic tables with stools attached, Mr. Mead said, “All of our meals are planned by dietitians with calories of 3,200 a day, 3,500 for children.”
Disputing claims by some lawyers that many detainees had lost weight there, Dr. Leroy T. Soto, the chief physician on duty, said a study had actually documented weight gains. There is a medical staff of 20.
Lawyers said detainees were rushed through meals in 15 or 20 minutes. Mr. Mead acknowledged “they can’t linger,” but said it was because of classes or other activities.
Showing off a classroom with computers, Jean Bellinger, assistant administrator for programs, said children were divided into three age groups comparable to elementary, middle and high school for four hours’ a day of instruction plus an hour’s recreation and lunch. But she acknowledged that for several months a staff shortage limited class time to an hour a day.
That was far too little, said Scott Medlock, a prison rights lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting from Dallas.
More Articles in National »
====
Austin Chronicle, Feb 2, 2007
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:441523
Immigrant Detention Blues
BY DIANA WELCH
Protesters outside the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor call for the release of an unknown number of "noncriminal alien families" incarcerated within.
Photo By Jana Birchum
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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