ustxtxb_obs_1987_08_14_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

THE TEXAS 13 SERVER August 14, 1987 A Journal of Free Voices One Dollar In Jail in Laredo Pho tos by Dia na Cla ito r an d Lou is Du bose BY DIANA CLAITOR AND LOUIS DUBOSE In South Texas a “Corrections Corporation” Warehouses Illegal Immigrants for the INS. Laredo LETICIA GARZA IS NOT certain that she wants to leave the Corrections Corporation of America’s Laredo Processing Center. “In Guatemala,” she said, “I had twenty-five cents a day that is about ten American cents to buy food for my children. Here for the first time in their life they eat three meals a day. Good food and a snack before they go to bed. Look at them; they are growing.” Garza, a 25-year-old single mother of three, insists that if her only other option is to return to Guatemala, she would prefer to remain with her three children “in this prison.” “It’s better here,” she said. “We have food and if the children get sick there is medicine.” Garza is one of four adults detained in the southeast dormitory, a section designed to house women with pre-adolescent children, at the Laredo center. Each of the three women interviewed \(two from agreed. They all have their own beds, food is ample, there are toys and medical care for the children and the guards have not treated them badly. They are, in many ways, better off than they were in their own countries. Jamilet, a 17-year-old Nicaraguan mother, and her infant son, have no country. The daughter of a veteran Somocista national guardsman, she said she left Nicaragua in 1979, in July, the very month of the Sandinista victory. She has lived in Honduras, Guatemala,