The Texas Observer

Anywhere from 50 to 100 detainees at the sprawling Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville stopped eating last Wednesday in an effort to draw attention to extended detention that they say violates their right to due process.

One of the detainees on hunger strike - Rama Carty - spoke to the Observer by phone on Friday about how he has been detained by ICE for more than 13 months.

Listen:
Click here to download the interview

“It’s unconstitutional. It’s unjust,” Carty said. “We’re held well past any reasonable time under the law, or just any reasonable time, period.”

Carty fell under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after he served two years in prison for what he says is a wrongful drug conviction. He spent time in detention centers in Maine and New Hampshire before being sent to Texas in December. In March, he came across an article in USA Today about a new Amnesty International report on how thousands of immigrants are detained for months or years without any meaningful judicial review of whether they should be released.

“If immigration removal is not reasonably foreseeable at all, then detention, in essence, shouldn’t exist,” Carty said, citing a Supreme Court precedent for cases like his.

Carty turns 39 next week and has lived in the United States since he was a year old. His parents are Haitian, but he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were working there. Neither country will accept him, so he languishes in detention in the country he calls home.

“I am a U.S. citizen from a cultural standpoint,” Carty told the Observer.

He wants a chance to argue he is a citizen from a legal standpoint as well. He said ICE mishandled his mother’s application for naturalization, and he should be given an opportunity to be considered a citizen. But, like many in the 1,200-bed facility, he said he lacks access to legal assistance.

“We are told we have lawyers available thru pro-bono associations but that’s not the truth,” Carty said of the overwhelmed legal aid offices that mostly focus on political asylum cases. “The amount of effective assistance of counsel is grossly insufficient,” he said.

Carty says he thinks the hunger strike will continue to grow. The strikers’ demands include a meeting with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special advisor on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.

A well-known Austin activist fingered as an FBI informant has acknowledged that he provided information leading to the arrest and felony indictment of two Austin men who participated in protests last September at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN.

“The simple truth is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of investigation [sic],” Brandon Darby said in an open letter he sent this week to friends he has worked with since 2002.

Darby’s activist network stretches from Austin to New Orleans, where he co-founded Common Ground Relief, a grassroots reconstruction effort that drew thousands of volunteers from around the country. In 2004, he helped organize and was arrested during anti-Halliburton protests in Houston. His letter suggests that he disagreed with tactics some members of the Austin Area Affinity Group planned to use to disrupt the Republican Convention. Darby was a member of the group.

“When people act out of anger and hatred, and then claim that their actions were part of a movement or somehow tied into the struggle for social justice only after being caught, it’s damaging to the efforts of those who do give of themselves to better this world,” reads Darby’s letter.

Darby’s fellow activists say they identified him as “CHS 1” – confidential human source 1 – after reviewing an affidavit (PDF) by FBI agent Christopher Langert that was released in discovery in the case against David Guy McKay, 22, and Bradley Neal Crowder, 23. They say information described in the affidavit came from conversations between McKay and Darby.

The informant told Langert that McKay and Crowder fashioned protest shields made from cutting traffic barrels in half. After describing how police seized these items from a trailer the two helped drive from Austin to St. Paul, Langert refers to conversations gathered when the informant wore a wire to record McKay talking about how he and Crowder had made Molotov cocktails, using tampons soaked in lighter fluid for wicks.

The Molotov cocktails were among the items seized in a raid that led to felony indictments of McCay and Crowder, now known as the “Texas Two.” They were charged with possession of unregistered firearms (the cocktails). Information gathered by Darby may have contributed to broader charges against eight others from around the country for conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism.

Several of Darby’s friends initially defended him against accusations that he was an informant, but after they acquired additional court documents from sources close to the case against McCay and Crowder, they confronted him days before he went public.

“I don’t feel like I lost my credibility,” says longtime Austin-based activist Scott Crow. “But I staked my credibility defending him, and people backed me up.” Now that Darby has gone public, Crow is ready to go on the offensive.

“While it is not yet clear how long or to what extent Darby has been acting as an informant, the emerging truth about Darby’s malicious involvement in our communities is heart-breaking and utterly ground-shattering to some of us who were closest to him,” says Crow, who in 2005 co-founded Common Ground Relief with Darby.

Activists in St. Paul with the RNC Welcoming Committee posted a video in October 2007 that showed a tongue-in-cheek use of a Molotov cocktail to light a barbeque. Langert’s affidavit states that Darby had been working with the FBI since November 2007.

Crow and another member of the group claim the additional court documents – which the group has so far declined to make public - show Darby actively encouraged, enabled and provoked McKay and Croder to take illegal action. Crow asserts that Darby “hadn’t even met these guys yet” when he began reporting to the FBI. “How can you know they’re going to plan something,” he asks, “if you hadn’t met them yet?”

McCay’s father has previously argued that his son was naïve and gullible.

McCay and Crowder have been denied bail and remain in federal detention in St. Paul. Their trial date has been postponed indefinitely. They each face seven to 10 years in prison.

–Renee Feltz is a fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and an intern with the investigative unit at The New York Times.