Author: mopress

email from Jay Johnson-Castro

Just got this. I’m repulsed.

Rather than heed the voice of the people…the Raymondville concentration camp will be expanded…by 50%. 1,000 More beds.

1,000 more beds? Hell! One thousand more refugees and immigrants every day. None of which have ever been charged with a crime. $5000 of our tax money will be paid per month per immigrant to “for-profit” MTC and $2.25 per person per day…time 3000…to Willacy County due to political corruption. The people commiting this crime against humanity are the real criminals…the real “illegals”.

Please feel free to share this with your respective groups…

In solidarity…

Jay

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ICE plans for expansion

Allen Essex (Valley Morning Star)

July 12, 2007 – 10:14PM

RAYMONDVILLE — Willacy County officials have taken preliminary steps to build a 1,000-bed expansion to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.

Planning for three permanent buildings is in the works, rather than additional Kevlar dome tent-type structures that are used now, Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence said.

“They’ve been having meetings with Homeland Security and ICE,” said Spence.

“They’re wanting to expand. They’re waiting (for federal approval). At least they’re laying the groundwork for it.”

District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said county commissioners violated the Texas Open Government Act this week by discussing the detention center in closed session and then voting for it afterward without discussion.

Guerra said Thursday that commissioners illegally approved the “$40 million project.”

In a letter to Gov. Rick Perry last month, County Judge Eliseo Barnhart said commissioners have had to hire outside attorneys to advise them because Guerra hasn’t attended a county meeting for months.

Spence said Guerra did attend part of Monday’s meeting, but said Guerra, the district and county attorney, has rarely attended county meetings in the past several months.

Commissioner Eddie Chapa would only confirm that an “economic development” item was passed Monday after discussion in closed session.

That item was listed as No. 5 on Monday’s Commissioners Court agenda:

“EXECUTIVE SESSION as authorized by Texas Government Code Section 551.087, discussion and consideration of an Economical Development Project and approving an amendment to the agreement between Willacy County, U.S. Homeland Security, and Immigration Customs Enforcement Contract No. DROIGSA-06-0031HSCEOPTG00004 and authorize the County Judge to execute the agreement.”

Meeting minutes provided by County Clerk Terry Flores show that Chapa made the motion to approve the agreement, which was seconded by County Judge Pro Tem Emilio Vera.

Commissioner Aurelio Guerra abstained from voting. Barnhart was absent.

Neither Barnhart or Vera could be reached for comment.

When the first phase of the federal detention enter opened in August 2006, federal officials said it was designed to hold 500 illegal immigrants.

Carl Stuart, spokesman for Management and Training Corp., the company that operates the Willacy detention center under a contract with ICE, said he could not comment on future plans at the center without clearance from federal officials.

ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda in San Antonio said media inquries about the project have been forwarded to officials in Washington.

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Wednesday, June 20th, was the seventh annual World Refugee Day, honoring the spirit and courage of those who flee economic and political malaise. This official day was established through the United Nations.

Sometimes our country, for certain purposes, will hail the United Nations as important, demanding that other nations abide by its standards. Sometimes major US figures make speeches at the United Nations and occasionally mention the Declaration of Human Rights. But more often than not, concerning international rights and law, the US is a cheap scofflaw. I doubt World Refugee Day even crossed President Bush’s mind.

A former Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, who is the chief U.N. commissioner on these matters, stressed that helping refugees is “a moral and legal imperative” not just an “optional act of charity.” His World Refugee Day address criticized Western Europe, according to the New York Times, for “inflaming sentiment against refugees by calling them ‘bogus’ asylum seekers who are ‘flooding’ their countries.” Lubbers said that those who talked that way used to be associated with “small extremist parties” but now are in major ones. Lubber’s criticism should sting the US as well as Europe.

In Texas this weekend, I will join two demonstrations in sympathy with World Refugee Day. One (Saturday) is against the detention center in Taylor, near Austin, which is housing children, and another (Sunday) is against the Raymondville detention center, a tent city with maybe 2,000 people, from maybe thirty different countries, sleeping in bunk bed rows and getting outside one hour a day.

These centers are improperly holding people as if they were criminals, even though the inmates have not been convicted of crimes. Some inmates held productive jobs in this country for years and are stuck because of immigration paperwork technicalities; some came to this country recently asking for legal refugee status, having fled a miserable situation.

Amnesty International, co-sponsoring the demonstration in Taylor, states on its website that established conventions assume that asylum seekers are not to be “detained” unless warranted by special circumstances. Make no mistake, these detention centers are “detaining” people.

Raymondville’s tent city center was built adjacent to another prison and has armed guards who yell at the immigrants. It forces people to stand in line, does not have private shower stalls, makes no provision for those held inside to get to a mall or movie or church event. Immigrants are not just residing there; they are detained prisoners, and scared.

Private contractors who run these for-profit prisons are getting up to $10,000 per prisoner per month. (My source is Jay Johnson-Castro, a founder of Border Ambassadors, one of the groups sponsoring the weekend demonstrations.) Juicy federal money flows to Corrections Corporation of America and other companies, although it is known that other ways of monitoring immigrants while they wait for hearings, etc. are far less costly than incarceration.

Actually, detained refugees are treated worse than criminals in a sense. Although the UN 1951 Refugee Conventions state that a refugee should have the same access to courts as a national, we now have an increasingly politicized and capricious special immigration court system under the Justice Department. According to a study last year by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), getting asylum can depend simply on what judge one gets.

The TRAC report, according to Eunice Moscoso of Cox News Service, “directly challenged” the Justice Department that runs these immigration courts. The courts have a mission statement to provide “fair, expeditious and uniform application of the nation’s immigration laws in all cases.” But one Miami judge turned down 97 percent (!) of asylum requests between 2000 and 2005, while one New York judge only turned down 10 percent.

And there even seems to be a problem with the way immigration judges have been picked. (See my June 17 column examining partisanship in Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department). A Washington Post expose this month charged that the administration “increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws which preclude such considerations.”

Studying immigration judges appointed by Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, the Post article found the appointees greatly lacking in immigration law experience. (Republican fellowship seems like the main hiring criterion.) And with redress in federal courts extremely limited and habeas corpus suspended for immigrants, there goes a refugee’s right to have the same access to fair courts as a national.

Next week I will report on the demonstration at Raymondville’s detention center. I will be in Raymondville promptly at 6 pm Sunday, June 24, with my trusty notebook.

After the fireworks of July 4 have fallen back to earth, high summer in Texas will demand hard thinking about how people in a “land of the free and home of the brave” are supposed to act.

In early July, citizen-workers at the Swift meat cutting plant in Cactus, Texas will argue why their racketeering lawsuit against company management should not be dismissed.

Valenzuela, etal v Swift (3:06-cv-02322) was filed in the federal Northern District of Texas last December, alleging that managers of the butcher corporation have been hiring migrant workers in an effort to depress wages.

Lower wages would be the most obvious cost-cutting benefit of hiring migrant workers, but it is also cheaper to supervise workers less likely to demand their rights to workplace health and safety.

For named plaintiffs in the lawsuit — Blanda Valenzuela, Margie Salazar, Jose A. Serrato, Josie Rendon, Clara Tovar, Consuelo Espino, Maria Avila, Ernestina Navarrette, Maria E. Munoz, Amanda Salcido, Candelario G. Ortega, Maria Ortiz, Jose Oliva, Rafaela Chavez, Elodia Arroyo, Susana Cardiel, Gracie Rios, and Leonel Ruiz — the Swift company’s hiring practices deliberately undermined the value of workers.

A Dallas Observer story by Megan Feldman, “Ground Meat,” really digs into the guts of the Cactus butcher factory, where workers are ever slipping onto gore-strewn floors, or ruining their own tendons as they cut into cow carcasses at a rate approximating 400 per hour.

About the same time that the federal court will be updating the Swift worker lawsuit, the United Nations will convene the first meeting of its Global Forum on Migration and Development.

Session 1.3, for example, “aims at some best policy guidelines for governments to engage with the private sector to the mutual advantage of migrants, host communities, employers and developing economies.”

“This session will address the following questions: How can private sector and other non-state agencies better ensure that migrants are well informed and protected from abusive and malevolent practices (e.g. at the hands of smugglers or traffickers), both in their migration and the job placements abroad? How to balance facilitation and control of these players to help them facilitate beneficial and protective migration without further driving such agencies underground.”

As a working idea, we look forward to July’s high summer as a time for “free and brave” assertions about respecting rights of workers, for citizens and migrants alike. Otherwise, the only “mutual advantage” we see is where companies are able to depress the value of labor because immigration authorities intimidate migrants rather than protect their fundamental human rights.–gm

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro

Today we celebrate World Refugee Day…

Freedom Ambassadors are grateful to Amnesty International for their support in this celebration…here in Texas…at the Hutto prison camp that imprisons innocent children from all over the world…and their mothers…who are seeking asylum.

Freedom Ambassadors will keep celebrating the World Refugee Day to the end of the week…when we hold Hutto Vigil X in Taylor, TX on Saturday, June 23…sponsored by Amnesty International. Hutto Vigil X is essentially an all day event. The Amnesty International sponsored program is from 1-3pm. We expect a record turnout…in solidarity with the children immorally and criminally imprisoned there by Chertoff and ICE.

Then, as many that can, Freedom Ambassadors will head down to Raymondville, TX on June 24th where 2000 refugees from some 50 countries are imprisoned by Chertoff and ICE in a 10-tent concentration camp. We will join up with the Valley coalition that will be holding a vigil from 6-8pm.

The attached statement (below) and letter which features the innocent little victims of Chertoff and ICE is from Amnesty International. The Amnesty International contact information follows at the end of this letter.

In every other country of the world…we call them refugees. As Americans…we sincerely want to help. The elitist supremacists call refugees in America “illegals”…thereby desensitizing the Americans’ natural spirit and desire to reach out and help. This allows ICE to inhumanely round up refugees in American..and imprison them in “for-profit” concentration camps.

We do not really celebrate this inhumane treatment of refugees in America by Chertoff and ICE. We celebrate their inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Freedom Ambassadors will be launching our new web site this week. Stay tuned.

Hoping to see you Saturday and Sunday…

Jay

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Amnesty International USA’s
REFUGEE ACTION

600 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, Ste. 500
Washington, DC 20003
T. 202.544.0200
F.202.546.7142
E-mail. refugee@aiusa.org

June 18, 2007

UNITED STATES: Oppose the Detention of Refugee and Migrant Children

SUMMARY: Amnesty International is concerned about hundreds of migrant children and their parents who are detained at the Don T. Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. The Hutto building used to hold criminals before being converted to a temporary residence for refugee and migrant children. Children from Central America and other parts of the world including Greece, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Russia and Romania are detained at Hutto in prison cells for months at a time.

BACKGROUND: Every day, the United States government detains over 600 migrant children and their parents who are asking permission to remain here legally. Some families flee violence and war in their home countries and come to the United States hoping to be protected by our government. Others come because they want to have a better life than they left behind. When immigration officers find families who don’t have permission to stay, they can lock them in facilities like Hutto until they decide whether to allow the families to remain in the U.S. Sometimes this process can take years.

The detention of families expanded dramatically in 2006 with the opening of the new 512-bed T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Prior to the opening of Hutto, the majority of immigrant families were arrested and then released from custody while they worked through their immigration cases. Hutto is a former criminal facility that houses immigrant children in prison cells. Some families with children have been detained in the facility for up to two years. The majority of children in the facility appear to be under 12 years old.

According to international standards to which the United States has agreed, asylum seekers, in particular, are not to be detained unless warranted by special circumstances. Migrants in detention are to be afforded the same rights as nationals who are detained, and even in detention, children have the right to be with their families, to get an education, to have recreational time, and to live in a place that is safe.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please contact the Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, asking the government to stop holding migrant children and their parents in prison-like facilities. You can also copy your letter to the head of Hutto, and the Juvenile Coordinator for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

SAMPLE LETTER:

Michael Chertoff, Secretary
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
245 Murray Lane, SW
Washington, D.C. 20528

Dear Secretary Chertoff:

I write with regard to the detention of migrant families and children in the Don T. Hutto Detention Facility in Taylor, TX. Since Hutto opened, the detention of families in the United States has increased. The use of a prison-like facility that has not been updated to meet the needs of detained migrants and asylum seekers is not appropriate, especially for children. The majority of children detained at Hutto appear to be under 12 years old, and they have a right to be with their families in a place that is safe, with education and recreational opportunities.

Additionally, I remind you that international standards for the treatment of asylum seekers recommend against detention except under special circumstances. And migrants in detention are to be afforded the same rights as nationals who are being held.

I urge you to investigate the conditions at Hutto to determine whether it is appropriate to hold migrant families with children there, and if not, to resolve the situation immediately.

Thank you for your prompt attention to my concerns,

cc:

Simona Colon
T. Don Hutto Residential Center
1001 Welch Street, P.O. Box 1063
Taylor, TX 76574

John Pogash
ICE National Juvenile Coordinator
Department of Homeland Security
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
800 I Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20536