-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 1, 2007 8:29:53 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: (2) "Gitmos" Disguised As Prisons Secretly Operating -- on
Main Street, USA
Immigrant Families Sold Out, Locked Up
By Amy Goodman,
King Features Syndicate, February 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/rights/48627/
Private prisons make money from locking up immigrant families --
including children -- indefinitely.
"I want to be free. I want to go outside, and I want to go to
school," pleaded a 9-year-old boy, on the phone from prison. This
prison wasn't in some far-off country, some dictatorship where one
would expect children to be locked up. He is imprisoned in the
United States.
The boy, Kevin, is imprisoned in Taylor, Texas, at the T. Don Hutto
Residential Facility. His parents are also locked up there. The
tale of how this family became imprisoned is just one example of
how broken our immigration policies are in this country. It is a
tale of children left behind, of family values locked up, of your
tax dollars at work.
The parents are Iranian and spent 10 years in Canada seeking
asylum. Kevin, their son, was born in Canada during that time.
Their request for asylum was eventually denied, and they were
deported back to Iran. Majid, the father, said he and his wife were
jailed and tortured there. They soon fled to Turkey and bought
Greek passports. They hoped to reapply for asylum in Canada, armed
with proof of the torture they suffered in Iran.
On a plane back to Canada, a fellow passenger suffered a heart
attack, requiring an unscheduled landing in Puerto Rico. Although
they never had any intention of entering the U.S., because the
plane touched down here, their passports were questioned and they
were detained. The family was shipped off to Hutto. They have been
there for more than three weeks.
Immigration detention places the family in a legal limbo that could
leave them imprisoned indefinitely, perhaps only to be deported
back to more torture in Iran.
This shameful practice of locking up children is bad enough. What's
worse is that it is being done for profit, by the Corrections
Corporation of America. CCA is the largest publicly traded private
prison operator in the U.S. CCA has close to 70 facilities
scattered across the country, recent earnings of $1.33 billion and
a gain in its stock-share price of 85 percent in the past year.
Industry analysts gush at the profit potential promised by private
prisons. Their commodity: human beings.
A recent report issued jointly by two nonprofit agencies -- the
Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran
Immigration and Refugee Service -- titled "Locking Up Family
Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families," paints a grim picture
of the conditions these families endure. While in 2005 Congress
directed the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement to detain families in "non-penal, homelike
environments," the report details how prisonlike the Hutto facility
is. While ICE announced Hutto as a new facility, it was formerly a
prison.
Children as young as 6 are separated from their parents, kept in
prison cells with heavy steel doors equipped with a sensitive laser
alarm system. The children wear prison uniforms. They get one hour
of school per day, and one hour of recreation. All non-lawyer
visits are "non-contact," through a plexiglass window speaking over
a phone, to obviate the "necessity" of a full-body cavity search
after each visit. Yet the chairman of the CCA board of directors,
William Andrews, begs to differ: "The reports come from special-
interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization
and the whole immigration situation. ... The family facility,
particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home." Recent
reports put the total number of children at Hutto between 170 and 200.
Close to a year after massive pro-immigrant marches occurred in
every major U.S. city, immigration policy remains broken, with
sensational crackdowns on undocumented workers, a planned
multibillion-dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and more than
26,000 immigrants in prison.
CCA stock is up, but the spirits of 9-year-old Kevin are down, as
he languishes in his federally funded private prison cell. He wants
to go home to Canada, where he was born. U.S. immigration officials
now hold his fate and that of his parents: deportation to possible
torture in Iran, or political asylum and a possible return to Canada.
With a Congress obsessed with nonbinding resolutions and the Bush
administration that brought you Abu Ghraib and the Maher Arar
deportation scandal, the prospects for Kevin and his parents are
grim at best.
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