Hutto Update
June 13th, 2007 at 10:03 am
When last we checked, about two months ago, litigation challenging the detention conditions of immigrant children in Texas was winding it’s slow way through the system. Yesterday at a meeting of the Austin Lawyer Chapter of the American Constitutional Society, two of the women primarily responsible for the legal pressure on the T. Don Hutto detention facility in Taylor said they expect the case to go to trial this August, even though all of the original plaintiffs in the suit have since been released.
Lisa Graybill, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, and Barbara Hines, a law professor at UT who runs the immigration clinic, said the cases would proceed according to which families remained in the facility at the time of the trial. Graybill said after the event that the legal team had filed 10 more complaints yesterday, and more were possible. Because of jurisdictional constraints, the lawyers can’t file the litigation as a class-action suit; they must go to trial with individual complaints. As the federal government has been releasing the original plaintiffs (for a variety of reasons), Graybill and Hines have been filing more complaints on behalf of families still stuck in Hutto.
Sam Sparks, the Austin judge who will hear the case, has agreed to hear the complaints as a group. That means, Graybill said, the plaintiffs at trial will simply be whoever they’ve filed complaints for that are still in Hutto.
The Hutto facility, a converted medium-security prison, is one of two detention centers used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house immigrant families (including young children) seeking asylum in the U.S. Opponents charge that the facility is an unhealthy and inappropriate environment for the children, as well as a violation of a legal settlement that requires that children be detained in the least restrictive environment possible. For past coverage of the facility see the Observer Blog here and here, and this Washington Post article.
July 5th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
[…] Texas Observer - Because of jurisdictional constraints, the lawyers can’t file the litigation as a class-action suit; they must go to trial with individual complaints. As the federal government has been releasing the original plaintiffs (for a variety of reasons Read More […]