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Maria Cecilia Ovalle didn’t expect to take care of her two small children alone. Until May, she lived in Houston with her husband Juan Jose Carranza Alvarado and their children, a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. But after a scuffle at work, Juan was questioned by police who discovered he didn’t have immigration papers. They arrested him immediately.

Her husband, a steelworker in Texas for more than 10 years, was sent to the Joe Corley Detention Center in Conroe, 40 miles north of Houston. He was the breadwinner of their household and without papers, Ovalle says she’s had a hard time finding a job. She sold things from their home—an Xbox, two TV sets—to pay rent, but she’s not sure how long she can keep it up without work.

Ovalle isn’t sure how long her husband will be locked up. If he’s given an immigration bond to stay in the U.S., she says she’ll find a way to pay it. She doesn’t want to think about what could happen if he is deported.

Being undocumented means that she can’t visit her husband at Joe Corley, so their only communication is an expensive daily phone call. Ovalle’s eyes well up with tears as she tells the Observer that their two children—both U.S. citizens—can’t see their father.

“They’re so young. It really affects them,” she says in Spanish. “They ask me, ‘Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy?’ I tell them he’s working far away.”

Ovalle says that anguish over her family’s separation drew her to the Polk County Adult Detention Center in Livingston on Saturday, joining some 70 other activists for a “Father’s Day Caravan to Close Polk.”

Austin-based nonprofits Grassroots Leadership and Texans United for Families organized the caravan, part of the national Detention Watch Network’s “Expose and Close” campaign, which calls for the immediate closure of 10 U.S. detention centers, including Polk County.

On a bus from Austin Saturday morning, I met more people with stories like Ovalle’s, and other activists, as we rode to Livingston.

Rocio Villalobos sits quietly in a window seat. As a member of Texans United for Families, she coordinates a volunteer visitation program to T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a 512-bed private, for profit detention center in Taylor that imprisoned families until 2009.

Just over 500 women are currently detained in Hutto, which has received scrutiny for violating ICE detention standards. Villalobos says conditions in Polk are similar, if not worse.

She says one thing that differentiates the two is access to contact visits. At Polk, a glass partition separates visitors and detainees. “The act of being detained, the act of being so isolated, and being kept from any kind of social contact or emotional contact with their loved ones, is adding to their distress,” she says.

Her concerns are many: isolation of detainees, lack of access to proper medical and legal services, labor practices within facilities, separating families, and the massively profitable private prison system, which the Observer reported on in May.

A few miles from the facility, some passengers lather themselves in sunscreen and prepare for the next couple hours in the Texas summer heat.

The charter pulls into a driveway where another busload of people from the Houston-based nonprofit LIFT: Liberating Immigrant Families Together are waiting. As I step off the bus, I catch my first look at the large beige structure.

The IAH Secure Adult Detention Facility, as it’s known more officially, is a 1,054-bed prison run by the for-profit Community Education Centers (CEC). U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pays CEC an average of $56 a day for each bed filled, according to a report by Detention Watch Network and Texans United for Families. Now, 822 beds are filled by men waiting—some up to a year—for their immigration hearings.

The report, based on interviews with 60 detainees, the warden, CEC staff members and two ICE officials last July, details some of the conditions in Polk. Among its long list of offenses: inadequate medical care, solitary confinement, no contact during visits, unhealthy meals and labor exploitation.

Sam Vong, who wrote the report, joined the Polk caravan. Last July he toured the facility with other Texans United for Families members.

“These are cinder-block cells where there are eight men in each very small cell with no privacy,” Vong says. “One man even talked about having to drink from a water foundation directly adjacent to the toilet. It’s very dehumanizing.”

Immigrant rights advocates say they’re worried about what’s happening inside Polk’s walls. But on Father’s Day weekend, this event is focused on what’s happening to families separated by detention.

Yajaira Lopez is standing in the shade, listening to speakers at the vigil. Back in January, more than 10 ICE officials entered her family home and arrested her husband Jayron, threatening to deport him to Guatemala. Yajaira says their young daughters watched as ICE agents took their dad away.

Jayron was imprisoned in the Joe Corley Detention Center until May when he received immunity. Yajaira tells me her 11-year-old daughter Jasmine’s attitude started changing, and both of their daughters’ grades slipped. Yajaira has a pacemaker for her congestive heart failure, and was even hospitalized for two days in February, which she attributes to stress from Jayron’s case.

Yajaira says she and her daughters, all U.S. citizens, were able to see Jayron while he was detained. But it’s not uncommon for detainees to have few visitors.

Matt Gossage is a volunteer for Texans United For Families, and director of the documentary “Hutto: America’s Family Prison.” The problem is multifaceted, he says. One is that undocumented family members can’t visit without a passport or visa, and he says even coming to vigils like this one is a risk. Even then, people might be detained in states far from their family. “It’s not always logical why ICE will send detainees to certain facilities. They have their own reasons but it’s not for the welfare or wellbeing of the detainees and their families,” he says.

Saturday’s protesters want President Obama, ICE, CEC and the men locked beyond the tall fence to hear their call and end immigrant detention.

As Ovalle finishes sharing her story, the crowd chants, “No estas sola, no estas sola.” “You’re not alone.” They say this to offer their support, but it also conveys a hard truth.

“We want to remind people at the facility that we’re here, we care about them, and we’re going to continue to push for it to be closed,” Villalobos says.

Before filing onto the uses and heading back home that afternoon, the crowd erupts into one last chant: “We’ll be back!”

PHOTO SOURCE: FACEBOOK.COM/HOUSTONPOLICE

On Monday, a grand jury declined to indict the Houston police officer who in September shot and killed Brian Claunch, a mentally ill, wheelchair-bound double amputee, for refusing to drop a pen.

HPD Officer Matthew Marin and his partner had responded to a disturbance call at Healing Hands, a small residential group home in central Houston for men with mental illness. Claunch, 45, suffered from schizophrenia and was agitated because he wanted a soda and cigarettes. Police say he yelled threats at the officers and backed Marin’s partner into a corner while waving something shiny, which turned out to be a ballpoint pen. When Claunch wouldn’t drop the shiny object, Marin killed him with one shot.

The case sparked international outrage. Why didn’t Marin use a Taser? HPD has a nationally-recognized crisis intervention team for handling suspects with mental illness—why wasn’t it there? How did Marin’s partner get cornered by a man with only one arm to propel his wheelchair?

Most important, if Claunch’s death isn’t considered an unjustified use of lethal force by HPD officers, what is?

Statistically, nothing.

Between 2007 and 2012, HPD officers killed citizens in 109 shootings and injured them in 112. Houston police also killed animals in 225 shootings and injured them in 109. The department’s Internal Affairs Division investigated every one of the 555 shootings and found them all justified.

Officers fare almost as well in the criminal justice system. No law enforcement officer in Harris County has been charged in a shooting since 2010, when Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton was acquitted for shooting an unarmed man, Robbie Tolan, in his own front yard.

HPD says Internal Affairs is still investigating whether Claunch’s death was justified. That’s odd because IAD investigations are required to wrap within six months and Claunch died almost nine months ago. Investigations that exceed the time limit void their results and can’t be grounds for any discipline, which is how one of the officers fired for beating 15-year-old unarmed burglary suspect Chad Holley got his job back.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating six questionable use-of-force cases by HPD officers, including Claunch’s death, Chad Holley’s beating, and the shooting death of Rufino Lara, an unarmed 54-year-old immigrant whom the officer said was ignoring commands in English and Spanish and made a threatening motion. Witnesses say the officer only gave commands in English and that Lara had his hands up and was complying when he was shot.

After these crazy maps showing America’s speech patterns went viral over the past week, it seems like everyone’s talking about accents and dialects. The maps were designed by a grad student in statistics and eventually found their way to the news website Business Insider, where they generated 17 million page views from folks eager to know who exactly says “y’all” and calls soda “pop.”

It’s safe to assume a fair number of those views came from Texas, where pride in our infamous drawl and twang is part of the state’s identity. But is Texas losing its unique ways of speaking? According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, slowly but surely. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that only about a third of the native Texans they interviewed used the distinctive vowel combinations that characterize Texas accents, down from almost 80 percent in the 1980s.

You can find some great audio examples of people talking Texan at the mother of all pop linguistics websites, started in 2010 by a hobbyist named Rick Aschmann. Click Texas on the map and you’ll be taken to a treasure trove of video links to famous Texans exercising their native tongue.

Researchers claim the erosion of specifically Texan speech is a result of the ever-broadening influence of pop culture, urbanization, and the influx of new residents from other parts of the country. They note that the decline is most prevalent among younger Texans.

A posible corrective to the disappearance of native speech—the state’s distinctive sayings, if not its accents—is the April publication of Texas Sayings & Folklore (Bright Sky Press), by Mavis Parrott Kelsey, Sr.

Feel free to add your favorite Texasism in the comments.