Critics call detainees facility 'harmful' for immigrant families

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/4532392.html

Feb. 7, 2007, 1:49AM
AWAITING THEIR FUTURE
Critics call detainees facility 'harmful' for immigrant families
LISA FALKENBERG
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

TAYLOR - A few hours after Mustafa Elmi slipped undetected across the Rio Grande in June, he was arrested by Border Patrol officers for entering the country illegally.

Within two weeks, he was transported to a Central Texas facility wrapped in a high, razor-wire fence and overseen by an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Somali Muslim was fingerprinted, photographed and issued a uniform.

Surveillance cameras eyed him. Guards timed his meals on wristwatches. He was counted, along with the others, three times a day. And if he stepped out of line, his mother was there to shush him into submission.

Mustafa is 3 years old.

For seven months, he was one of an estimated 200 children, mostly from countries other than Mexico, being held with their parents at a correctional center turned into a detention facility for immigrant families facing deportation.

The facility in Taylor, overseen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and run by for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, is one of only two in the nation that detain families. The other, a former nursing home, is in Pennsylvania.

ICE officials say the "state of the art" facility, which opened in May, is a humane alternative to severing immigrant families while parents wade through a swamp of bureaucracy, awaiting either asylum or deportation. The agency abandoned the old "catch and release" method after 9/11 because most immigrants weren't showing up for their hearings.

"I do understand that when you approach the facility, it does look like a detention facility, but once inside, I think we've done a very good job of softening things to make it as family-friendly as we can," Gary Mead, assistant director for detention and removal operations in Washington, said Tuesday.

But if humane treatment is the goal, human rights activists and other critics say the Taylor facility has failed.

"It is wrong for the United States to be detaining immigrant families with young children in a prisonlike environment when they have alternatives," said Rebecca Bernhardt, of the American Civil Rights League of Texas. "I don't think most Americans are aware that we're doing this. If they knew what the conditions were like, if they could see the families, they would find this pretty outrageous."
Resolution filed
Bernhardt and other members of Texans United for Families are holding a news conference today in Austin to discuss a resolution filed by state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin.

"Children who have had no decisive role in their migration or flight should not be exposed to avoidable trauma," reads the resolution, which asks the Homeland Security Department to reconsider all alternatives to detaining asylum-seeking families.

The resolution echoes orders a congressional committee made in 2005, advising children be detained only as a last resort, and only in "nonpenal, homelike environments."

"Homelike" is not the scene depicted by former detainees, family members, attorneys and refugee advocates interviewed by the Houston Chronicle over the past month. They say that although the sign out front reads the T. Don Hutto "Residential" Center, it remains a prisonlike environment.
Detainees say that families sleep in cold prison cells, with the slamming of jail gates and a siren of wailing children ringing in the halls. During the day, they share couches in a common area, reading or watching TV for hours on end.

Parents say their children have gone weeks, even months, without feeling the sun on their faces. They're not allowed to run, jump or laugh too loudly indoors. They get an hour a day to play in a spare gym.

While many of the guards are said to be warm and friendly with the children, presenting them with stickers and turns at the PlayStation, others are said to yell at misbehaving youngsters and even threaten to separate them from their mothers if they don't comply.

"They don't treat people like humans, only animals," said one former detainee, who is seeking asylum from gang violence and corruption in Guatemala. He asked that his name not be used for fear it would hurt his asylum case. "The baby was crying a lot because he didn't see the sun. I thought prisons were for murderers. What did the baby do wrong?"

For several months, Hutto children got one hour of school, but ICE officials say they recently increased that to four.

Some detainees complain of rashes and sores, which they believe could be caused by dirty uniforms, detergent allergies or depression and stress. Some children reportedly suffer vomiting bouts from the food or weight loss from refusing to eat.

Mustafa's mother, Bahjo Hosen, said her toddler won the hearts of many guards. But he soon became sick with diarrhea, fever and dizziness, she said. He would often vomit after meals and lost several pounds after he refused to eat the food and drank only milk.

"I asked many times, 'My son doesn't eat, can you please give him vitamins?' They said they weren't allowed," said Bahjo.

During lunch, Bahjo said guards would set their watches for 20 minutes or so as mothers and fathers urged their children to eat "rapido, rapido." Those at the end of the line often had only a few minutes and wouldn't finish, Bahjo said.

But her son learned to stay still when he had to, especially during count three times a day, which could take hours.
Detainees' allegations
Detainees and their family members also told the Chronicle they were frequently denied contact visits with family, prompt medical attention, dietary accommodations and affordable phone access without cutoffs. If true, the allegations would all be violations of ICE's own detention standards.
ICE officials at Hutto have not yet accommodated a request by the Chronicle to tour the facility, but they have promised an in-depth interview soon.
An ICE fact sheet says the facility "operates in accordance with applicable ICE detention standards," meals are approved by certified dieticians and classes are taught by state-certified teachers.

ICE officials in Washington defend the agency's use of the Hutto facility, saying it's the best way to protect and keep track of immigrant families and deter smugglers from using children to cross the border.

Mead said he hadn't heard reports of children vomiting, but that, of the nearly 2,000 people who have passed through Hutto, there have been only 27 grievances. All involved food except six, which involved medical issues, clothing and laundry, and were resolved.

Mead said ICE has added paint, carpet, toys and a playground. He also said the so-called uniforms are same-colored sweatpants and sweatshirts. "I absolutely reject the idea that they're in prison garb because they're not," he said.
Believed in the system
Mustafa and his mother, Bahjo, were released from Hutto last week.

They arrived last June after fleeing death threats in their homeland. Bahjo said her brother had been murdered and the killers were afraid she'd turn them in. Fearing for her life, she left her husband and 7-year-old son in Mogadishu and boarded a flight to Mexico.

She crossed the border in Mission and wandered lost for a few hours before she found a woman who gave her and Mustafa, then 2, some water. Bahjo asked the woman to call immigration authorities. The woman at first refused and told her to run, but Bahjo insisted she wanted to turn herself in to formally request asylum.

She believed in the American system.

"I used to think this was the best country in the world, that it would take care of kids, respect kids," she said. "I never thought I would be seven months inside Hutto."

She was arrested and separated from her son for about two weeks while authorities kept her in bedless holding stations and asked her repeatedly if she was a terrorist.

At Hutto, she lost herself in books. One day, her son caught her crying after a guard barged in on her in the restroom.

Bahjo got pro bono legal aid from Political Asylum Project of Austin and her bail was set in August, hers at $2,000, her toddler's at $1,500. But she couldn't pay it, so they stayed in Hutto for five more months.

When the judge granted her asylum last week, she said only three words: "Thank you, judge."

Now at a home in Austin for refugee women and children, Mustafa plays with toys. His mother is thinking about her future, getting a job, getting the rest of her family here. And she's reflecting about Hutto: She doesn't blame the guards; they were doing their job, she says.
But she's glad to see another side of the U.S.

"Outside, I think the people are still the way I used to think about them. They are good people," she said.

lisa.falkenberg@chron.com

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Detention Center Blues
News: Inside a former Texas prison where children—even infants—are held with their families on immigration charges.
By Josh Harkinson
February 6, 2007





Inmate Faten Ibrahim was unlikely to escape. She lived at a compound built as a prison for Texas' worst criminals, within a double layer of razor wire. Her eight-by-eight-foot cell offered only a thin sliver of window, her toilet in an open corner left no cover for stashing break-out tools, and, at any rate, cracking the cell's thick steel door at night would have tripped an alarm. She certainly wasn't going to try bolting, especially since Ibrahim, who lived in the cell with her mother for three months, is five.

Despite the minor threat that children such as Ibrahim pose on their own, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has nonetheless begun detaining them along with their parents on illegal immigration charges. The T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, near Austin, is one of two locations in the country that hold entire families together as they await rulings on asylum and deportation cases. The Ibrahims, for example, were denied asylum in the U.S. in 2004 and told to return to their native Palestine, but were detained in T. Don Hutto after Palestinian authorities refused to grant them reentry. Spokesmen for the immigration department say the policy allows it to monitor parents who might otherwise flee prior to court hearings, while also keeping the parents and their children together. T. Don Hutto, which opened in May and now holds roughly 200 minors and their relatives, is the only detention center housed in a former prison, and the department says it has been extensively renovated into "a modern, state-of-the-art facility."

Yet lawyers and human rights advocates question the ethics and legality of imprisoning children and say T. Don Hutto is, regardless, a bad place to start. "It's clearly not a setting that is appropriate for families," says Michelle Brané, an investigator with the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children who toured the facility late last year. She says a typical prison routine still exists there: all children who are big enough must wear scrubs akin to prison uniforms, and there's little to occupy their time besides lounging in the "pod," the same communal space walled off by prison cells that was once used by criminal inmates; when not hanging out there, children receive a single hour of physical recreation each day and, at the time Brané visited, a single hour of schooling in the form of an all-ages English class (The classes were upped to four hours recently, and are expanding to the seven hours required in Texas public schools). Brané was not impressed by efforts to brighten the pod with carpet and a mural depicting an ocean scene: "It's definitely a penal environment."

Five-year-old detainee Faten Ibrahim, who has large round eyes and wears her brown hair to her shoulders, suffered from nightmares and often sobbed uncontrollably at T. Don Hutto, according to a lawsuit that sought her family's release. In one instance she was "yelled at and threatened with 'punishment' for her failure to 'stand still'" during the prison's daily population count, the suit said. Her mother, Hanan--five months pregnant and likely suffering from morning sickness—complained of being too tired to join daily showers at 5:30 a.m., but was told that if she didn't she could be put in solitary confinement, according to the suit. The detention center was not staffed with a gynecologist, forcing Hanan to travel two hours away, bound in leg irons the entire time, to an outside clinic for prenatal care. Her absence from the pod so upset Faten and her siblings, aged eight and 14, that their mother stopped seeking medical treatment rather than leave them alone. The suit also claimed that the family of Palestinian political refugees was denied halal food at the prison cafeteria, prenatal vitamins for Hanan, and psychological counseling. "They were treated as inmates," said attorney Joshua Bardavid, "rather than a family being held for immigration reasons."

The Ibrahims are far from the only residents to complain of ill treatment at T. Don Hutto, where operations are run by the for-profit prison staffing company Corrections Corp of America. Lawyers with the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic, which has represented some 25 of the inmates, say several have reported weight loss and frequent vomiting, and parents have been unable to tend to sick children at night because rules ban them from leaving their cells after curfew. Other women have also complained of a lack of prenatal and mental health care. "I'm not a psychologist, but I go talk to these people, and they are just in shambles," said law fellow Frances Valdez. "I mean, they are losing their humanity." UT law professor and clinic director Barbara Hines believes imprisoning children is on its face unethical. "I've been doing this for thirty years," she said, "and I haven't been this upset about something in a very long time. It's just heartbreaking to go in there."

Immigration department spokeswoman Nina Pruneda did not respond to inquiries about the T. Don Hutto facility by press time, but forwarded an email detailing the center's selling points, which include adult classes--in parenting, English, family counseling and arts & crafts--and facilities such as a library, gym, and playground. Human rights investigators said access to the gym and playground is limited to a total of one hour a day, during the allotted recreation time. Many of the children kill most of their time fighting over a Sony Playstation in the pod, Brané said. She said the center was most lacking in developmental toys for younger children, especially soft toys such as stuffed animals that would be important to children experiencing trauma.

Some attorneys and human rights experts question whether incarcerating children in T. Don Hutto is actually legal. A 1993 Supreme Court decree to the immigration department requires it to do its best to detain children and their parents together, but the department must also hold the minors in the least restrictive setting possible. Human rights workers note that the nation's other family detention center, the Berks County Youth Center in Pennsylvania, offers a much more laid-back environment: it opened in 2001 in a former nursing home and doesn't require residents to wear prison scrubs or live in cells. "There's other settings that they could find besides a prison," attorney Bardavid said. Something "a heck of a lot less restrictive."

Still, the government argues that family detention centers are generally the most humane way to enforce immigration laws effectively; in March, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he plans to open more of them. The move has come in part from concern that children are being used as foils to facilitate border smuggling. Under the department's controversial "catch and release" policy, families detained across the border were often released with "Notices to Appear" before federal immigration judges, instead of being kept in custody. Smugglers exploited the policy by smuggling groups of immigrants along with random children, then claiming the group was a family when caught.
The American Civil Liberties Union contends that such problems could be addressed more cost-effectively and humanely, however, if the government provided better incentives for immigrants to show up for court dates. "There have been studies that show if you combine general monitoring with other social services you get a good return rate that is cheaper than detaining people," said Tom Jawetz, an attorney with the ACLU's National Prison Project.

The costs of holding immigrants while they await the outcome of trials can drag out; some families in the Berks facility have been detained up to two years, a fact that was most certainly on the minds of the Ibrahims when they appealed for pro-bono legal help. The family had been denied political asylum in the United States in 2004, but the Hamas-led Palestinian government wouldn't grant them permission to return. They were imprisoned in T. Don Hutto in November and left in limbo as attorneys sent letters around the world asking other countries to take them. In a highly unusual move last Friday, the Board of Immigration Appeals—reversing years of previous decisions—found that the Ibrahim family could be tortured by Hamas if they returned to the West Bank and reopened their case. On Saturday, Hanan and her children were released.

To date, much about the family detention centers remains unknown. A request to visit T. Don Hutto submitted by the Austin-American Statesman has gone unfilled since December, though the first-ever press tour has finally been scheduled for the end of this week. The TV interviews, should they be allowed, might not be pretty; when Brané recently interviewed detainees there, nearly every person she spoke with cried. She will release a report of her findings later this month and doesn't believe that T. Don Hutto can ever be made into a place that would be suitable for minors. Before she left the facility that day, a child ran up and pressed a folded piece of paper into her hand. "Help us," the note said, "ask questions."

Josh Harkinson is an investigative reporter at Mother Jones.


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Families Behind Bars
U.S. immigration policy is putting kids in jail
By Kari Lydersen
February 6, 2007 In These Times e Newsletter

Protesters stand outside the T. Hutto Residential Center during a candlelight vigil on Christmas Eve, 2006.


Named after the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center in Taylor, Texas, opened as a medium-security prison in 1997. Today, the federal government pays CCA, the nation's largest private prison company, $95 per person per day to house the detainees, who wear jail-type uniforms and live in cells.
But they have not been charged with any crimes. In fact, nearly half of its 400 or so residents are children, including infants and toddlers.

The inmates are immigrants or children of immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. Many of them are in the process of applying for political asylum, refugees from violence-plagued and impoverished countries like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Somalia and Palestine. (Since there are different procedures for Mexican immigrants, the facility houses no Mexicans.)

In the past, most of them would have been free to work and attend school as their cases moved through immigration courts. "Prior to Hutto, they were releasing people into the community," says Nicole Porter, director of the Prison and Jail Accountability Project for the ACLU of Texas. "These are non-criminals and nonviolent individuals who have not committed any crime against the U.S. There are viable alternatives to requiring them to live in a prison setting and wear uniforms."

But as a result of increasingly stringent immigration enforcement policies, today more than 22,000 undocumented immigrants are being detained, up from 6,785 in 1995, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Normally, men and women are detained separately and minors, if they are detained at all, live in residential facilities with social services and schools. But under the auspices of "keeping families together," children and parents are incarcerated together at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, as it is now called, and at a smaller facility in Berks County, Penn. Attorneys for detainees say the children are only allowed one hour of schooling, in English, and one hour of recreation per day.

"It's just a concentration camp by another name," says John Wheat Gibson, a Dallas attorney representing two Palestinian families in the facility.

In addition, there have been reports of inadequate healthcare and nutrition.

"The kids are getting sick from the food," says Frances Valdez, a fellow at the University of Texas Law School's Immigration Law Clinic. "It could be a psychological thing also. These are little kids, given only one hour of playtime a day, the rest of the time they're in their pods in a contained area. There are only a few people per cell so families are separated at night. There's a woman with two sons and two daughters; one of her sons was getting really sick at night but she couldn't go to him because he's in a different cell. One client was pregnant and we established there was virtually no prenatal care."

When local staff for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) collected toys for the children at Christmas, Hutto administrators would not allow stuffed animals to be given to the children, according to LULAC national president Rosa Rosales.

"That's what these children need—something warm to hug," she says. "And they won't even allow them that, why, I can't imagine. They say they're doing a favor by keeping families together, but this is ridiculous."

A CCA spokesperson refers media to the San Antonio office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but that office did not return calls for this story.

Immigrants have been housed at the facility since last summer, and public outrage and attention from human rights groups has grown in the past few months as more people have become aware of the situation. In mid-December, Jay J. Johnson-Castro, a 60-year-old resident of Del Rio, Texas, walked 35 miles from the Capitol to the detention center, joined by activists along the way and ending in a vigil at the center.

"Everyone I have talked to about this is shocked that here on American soil we are treating helpless mothers and innocent children as prisoners," says Johnson-Castro, who had previously walked 205 miles along the border to protest the proposed border wall. "This flies in the face of everything we claim to represent internationally."

A coalition of attorneys, community organizations and immigrants rights groups called Texans United for Families is working to close the facility. The University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic is considering a lawsuit challenging the incarceration of children.
Valdez sees the center as a political statement by the government.

"Our country likes to detain people," says Valdez. "I think it's backlash for the protests that happened in the spring—like, 'We're going to show you that you're not that powerful.' It's about power."

Kari Lydersen writes for the Washington Post out of the Midwest bureau and just published a book, Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age.