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.

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“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.

Some U.S. Senators (Lieberman) and Texas’ own Governor Goodhair say that President Obama is not doing enough to fight drug cartels with the border security plan he announced yesterday. It should be noted, however, that his plan at least acknowledges that Mexico’s drug problem is our drug problem too. And it emphasizes (gasp) communication with our neighbor to the south which is something our leadership has not engaged in, oh, eight years. Obama’s plan quadruples the number of U.S. liaisons working with Mexico in a binational effort to fight the drug cartels. This is a much needed and — dare I say it — logical step in coordination and communication between the two countries.

The word logical never entered the Bush Administration lexicon which focused on building border walls that cost $12 million a mile.

Obama does two things in his plan that Mexico has been asking for for years: a focus on the reduction in drug use in the United States and a crackdown on guns flowing south into Mexico. It’s not easy living next door to the world’s largest arms dealer. Mexico has often requested help from the U.S. Congress in reducing the number of guns funneled into Mexico. Obama’s plan relocates 100 ATF officers to the border in the next 45 days to fortify ATF’s Project Gunrunner aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico.

Finally, it is good to see that the plan focuses on the treatment and prevention of drug addiction.  Several decades of fighting the war on drugs has done little to stem drug use in the United States. It’s time to focus on prevention and treatment rather than building more prison complexes — sorry Geo Group.

And while the border wall boondoggle is not mentioned in Obama’s security plan, there is $100 million set aside for fences and virtual technology along the border in the economic stimulus bill. In a story yesterday by the Rio Grande Guardian, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was quoted as saying that her agency would finish the existing tracts of fencing — bad news for many Brownsville residents. With regards to new areas of fencing she said it would be in combination with technology and manpower. Napolitano seems to be de-emphasizing the use of border fences — another logical step . I’m getting nervous. I’ve used the word logical three times when talking about the federal government.

Tomorrow Williamson County commissioners will decide whether they want another year of the T. Don Hutto Immigration detention center in their county. The facility — run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America — is infamous for housing families, including young children, in a grim prison-like setting.

The conditions were once so bad at the Hutto facility that the ACLU — along with the ACLU of Texas, the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic and the international law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP — filed lawsuits on the behalf of children ages 3 to 16 who were being held in the facility. The children were kept in jail cells and not allowed outside. They were also threatened with separation from their parents if they made too much noise. One lawyer in the case told me that “they would have made the infants wear orange jumpsuits if they’d had small enough sizes.” The ACLU was successful in its lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and since then things have improved somewhat at the facility, according to the ACLU.

Still there is no denying that women and children are being kept in jail (a lucrative deal for CCA)  while they await a decision on a non-criminal matter (their immigration status) in court.

Every December advocates for immigrant and humanitarian rights gather for a candlelight vigil outside the facility in Taylor.  They want the facility closed for good. This week they are asking people to call the Williamson County Commissioners Court and persuade them to vote against renewing the contract with CCA. In a recent Austin American-Statesman article, however, many of the commissioners seem to think that $1 dollar a day the county receives from the federal government for each immigrant in the facility is still good business. Each month, the county can rake in as much as $16,000. The prison is funded at a cost of nearly $3 million a month by Immigration and Custom Enforcement.

County Judge Dan Gattis told the Statesman that he planned on voting for a renewal of the contract “unless something jumps up and bites me.”

State Rep. Debbie Riddle, a Republican from Tomball, continues her crusade against undocumented immigrants with a suite of bills that would turn the screws on non-citizens.

House Bill 50 would bar undocumented immigrants from paying in-state tuition. Similar bills failed last session. HB 48 would allow for state investigations into employers who have “knowingly” hired illegal immigrants. The Texas Workforce Commission could, through a tribunal process, strip the employer of state-issued licenses. (Call it the Brown Scare: “Mr. Smith, are you now or have you ever been the employer of an ILLEGAL ALIEN?”)

A third bill, HB 49, has received much less attention. It would create a new misdemeanor offense — Criminal Trespass By Illegal Aliens — that would appear to apply to a virtually limitless number of border-hoppers. Under the legislation, cops would be authorized to arrest individuals believed to be “trespassing” in Texas, among other federal immigration violations. Riddle’s new trespassing crime is in fact a state application of long-standing federal statutes that prohibit illegal entry into the U.S.

In recent years, federal prosecutors, working with the Border Patrol, have clogged Texas border courts with immigration cases. It’s part of the Bush administration’s “Operation Streamline,” a zero-tolerance program that aims to charge, convict, and deport every single apprehended illegal entrant.

That’s not good enough for Riddle. Her bill would dramatically widen this dragnet by allowing local law enforcement in on the game. The concern among immigrant rights groups is whether it’s appropriate for local cops to essentially enforce federal immigration laws.

Now, Riddle may seem like a hater, but like a lot of social conservatives she’s got God on her side. Back in March she told a House committee that the Big Guy was interested in seeing legislation like HB 49 taken up by the Lege. “I think God would have us work on this and then vote,” she said.

As the Democratic convention winds down and the Republican convention gears up, the immigration situation in the United States continues to worsen.

A three-hour immigration panel was held during the Democratic convention. Many of the attendees and speakers at the panel advocated for comprehensive immigration reform.

Beyond the pageantry of the political conventions a number of disturbing stories have surfaced in the media in the past week. These stories are about families divided, deportation drills at public schools, and unsupervised children abandoned on the Mexican side of the border.

For starters, the ACLU is investigating the nation’s biggest immigration raid to date, which occurred in Mississippi this week. The raid resulted in 600 detainees and countless broken families. Allegedly, workers were locked inside the factory and separated by race. They were also denied access to counsel and families were not told where their loved ones would be detained.

Because of these raids, school districts are asking for up to six emergency contacts for every child in case their parents are deported. The Garland school district is collecting emergency contacts for all of its students. An elementary school principal in the district says parents of his students have already been deported.

An Associated Press article details how deported women and children are increasingly being dropped off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the border town of Tijuana late at night alone and unsupervised in a dangerous city.

Because of tightening border security parents working illegally in the United States are no longer returning to their home countries to see their children. Instead they are taking the huge risk of having heir children smuggled across the border so they can be reunited.

Sometimes these children are detained by Border Patrol and deported to Mexico to fend for themselves. Many times they become victims of abuse and exploitation.

Many critics will at this point argue that immigrants need to enter the United States “legally.” But unless you are a millionaire or a star athlete it’s virtually impossible to do so. The Reason Foundation has put together a chart that illustrates the convoluted path an immigrant must navigate to enter the U.S legally to work. The chart has more twists and turns than a chutes and ladders game.

Comprehensive immigration was up for serious consideration in 2006 because the system was widely considered to be broken. In 2008, it is beyond broken. It seems a nation of immigrants has become the deportation nation.

A new study finds that unaccompanied children are being abandoned on the Mexican side of the border at an alarming pace.

In the last seven months, U.S. authorities have deported at least 90,000 children to Mexico, according to a study by the Mexican Government’s Commission on Population, Border and Immigration Affairs.

At least 13,500 of these children ages 17 and under were deported to Mexican border states but never reconnected with their parents or legal guardians. Many of these children have resorted to begging with the hopes of crossing into the United States again to be reunited with family members, according to the study. Other abandoned children are being cared for by churches and non-governmental organizations.

Many of these children were caught while being smuggled into the United States. U.S. authorities typically funnel the children through an “expedited” deportation process — sending them back to Mexico in a matter of hours.

The study cites another disturbing statistic: for every three adults deported to Mexico, one child is left abandoned in the United States.

Mexican border governors met with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about the deportations in February in Washington, D.C.

One of the biggest problems is lack of coordination between the U.S. and Mexican authorities. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, governor of Baja California, told Chertoff that many children end up homeless because Mexican authorities are not advised when the children will arrive and don’t have time to find appropriate housing for them.

Eugenio Javier Hernandez Flores, the governor of Tamaulipas, said that his state receives 35,000 deported immigrants a year, many of them children. “Our governments need to work on a procedure for these undocumented children,” he said.

The Mexican governors said that among the children there were also South American and Central American children being deported to Mexico.

Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, Secretary of the Commission on Population, Borders and Migrant Affairs, told Mexican legislators that the International Convention on the Rights of Children requires that children be “repatriated” to their home countries rather than “deported.”

Repatriation means that the United States would return the child back to his or her specific home rather than abandon the child at the border.

Repatriating children, however, would cost the U.S. more time and money.

Money and effort the Bush administration thus far isn’t willing to invest.

Bill Guerra Addington already fought to keep a nuclear waste dump out of his backyard in Sierra Blanca; now he’s fighting the Department of Homeland Security to keep a small footbridge that spans the Rio Grande on his alfalfa farm.

“I fought the Sierra Blanca nuclear dump and now I’m fighting Homeland Security — it’s just one thing after another,” says Addington.

To visit the Big Bend area is to be floored by the beauty and vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert region. The people who live there value their independence, but they also value their neighbors, whether those neighbors be Mexican or U.S. citizens.

In such a vast and remote area, your neighbor can mean the difference between life and death. Some small communities along the Rio Grande have been there since the 17th century. And for several hundred years, families have crossed back and forth to visit relatives and health clinics, to work and to buy food.

The footbridge that connects Addington’s farm with Mexico is used by Mexican farm workers and U.S. residents who want to visit Mexico. Without the bridge, either group would have to drive 140 miles round-trip to cross at a federal port of entry. And if Homeland Security has its way, that’s exactly what will happen.

Henry Miller, a property owner in Candelaria, about 100 miles east of Addington’s farm, said his town had its bridge seized and dismantled by Homeland Security last month. Miller and five high school buddies from Midland (class of ‘63) bought a majority of the town several years ago.

“It’s just a great place to get away, to go hunting and shoot dove and quail,” he says.

The metal suspension bridge was built in the 1950s to link the desert towns of Candelaria (pop. 50) in Texas and San Antonio del Bravo (pop. 150) in Mexico.

“The bridge kept the communities going. People would cross over on Friday to buy food, visit with friends then go back on Sunday,” Miller says.

See local historian Glenn Justice’s Web site for pictures and history of the Candelaria bridge. Justice describes a recent incident in which a man on the Texas side survived a heart attack because he was able to get across the bridge to the doctor in San Antonio del Bravo.

Miller says that drug and immigrant smuggling were never an issue with the small bridge. Besides there’s a Border Patrol office at the top of the hill overlooking the span, he says.

“We used to have about 70 kids attending school in that building, but it was taken over by the Border Patrol a few years ago,” Miller says.

Before the bridge was destroyed by the Border Patrol, Miller and his buddies received an ominous letter from the Department of Homeland Security directing them to dismantle it. “They said if we didn’t do it, they would fine us $3,000 for every person who crossed the bridge,” he says.

Miller says he and his partners declined to destroy the link between the two communities.

“What would the communities think of us, if we did such a thing?,” Miller asks. “It’s a humanitarian issue when you have to travel eight hours round trip to get from Candelaria to San Antonio del Bravo if you do it the way Border Patrol wants it.”

So Miller and the other five owners were summoned to Austin for a meeting with Homeland Security, “We had been told we’d be meeting with several head honchos,” he says. In the end, only Dan Harris, assistant patrol agent for the Marfa sector, showed up.

“At that moment Defense Secretary Robert Gates was touring West Texas and the Marfa sector,” Miller says. “So [the other officials] didn’t come because of his visit.”

Bill Brooks, public information officer for the Border Patrol’s Marfa sector, says there are six bridges that require removal in the 510-mile border sector.

“This law has been on the books for a long time,” Brooks says. “We’re human beings who are concerned for our neighbors, but these are not federal ports of entry.”

Brooks says Border Patrol is giving landowners six weeks to remove the bridges. He explains that the bridges used to be allowed as Class B ports of entry, but not since 9-11.

The Candelaria bridge now sits in pieces at Border Patrol headquarters in Marfa. “We’re just waiting to see what the landowners want to do with it,” Brooks says.

Miller says the crackdown is another blow for small Big Bend communities barely carving out a living. He says he’s considering hauling the broken bridge back to town as a protest against the militarization of the border.

“It’s devastating for the locals and I am afraid these communities will dry up,” he says. “And guess who will take over the homes and ranches? The drug dealers, because there won’t be anyone around anymore to keep them out or inform on them.”