February 6, 2007
Families Behind Bars
U.S. immigration policy is putting kids in jail
By Kari Lydersen
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 ( What Kind of Government do we have that puts kids in Jail for nothing?????)
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.)
“It’s just a concentration camp by another name,” says John Wheat Gibson, a Dallas attorney representing two Palestinian families in the facility.
Read the full story
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3015/families_behind_bars/
The ICE T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility:
maintaining family unity, enforcing immigration laws
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/huttodetentionfac.htm
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running a jail now for Illegals to hold there families.