‘Tis the Season for Immigrant Detention
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
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.”
December 26th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
As we prepare to mark the departure of the ‘unique’ Presidency of George W. Bush:
Dessert Honoring George W
As to George W we say goodbye,
Order his favorite - shoofly pie!