Author: mopress

Nick Braune is a Rio Grande Valley scholar and writer who walked with Jay Johnson-Castro this past weekend. He offered the following diary which we are pleased to publish in full.–gm

One of my People for Peace and Justice friends, Juan Torres, called me from his cell phone about 10 a.m. Saturday morning saying that he was on the walk with Jay Johnson-Castro heading to the Raymondville immigrant detention center. My wife and I drove up to meet Jay, although I did not know much about what he was doing.
When I met up with him, he was making the walk to Raymondville, while three of his friends and Juan Torres were walking intermittently and driving. Somehow I had missed the news about his visit and pilgrimage; had I known, I could have organized a bit for it. I feel bad about not helping, but in my defense we had a lot of balls in the air.

The People for Peace and Justice had a showing of “Iraq for Sale” on Friday night (18 people) in San Juan, one on Saturday night (11 people) in Harlingen, and a Sunday morning event planned at one of the Unitarian Churches on the new Student Farmworker Alliance which is trying to force McDonalds to quit exploiting farm workers in Florida.

(I feel a bit defensive because Jay expressed several times on Saturday that he was annoyed that so few were walking with him to Raymondville. And he is so intense when he talks that I was sure he was calling me lazy or something. I felt a bit offended, but I’m pretty certain now that I was misinterpreting him. The walking is hard and hot.)

Saturday afternoon Jay stopped in Sebastian, a halfway point between Harlingen and Raymondville. He told us he would be finishing up the next day, and my wife, Linda, and I said we would catch up with him then near Raymondville.

At the Saturday evening showing of “Iraq for Sale,” one of the men who came down to the Valley with Jay (Kenneth Koym, a psychologist) attended and shared with our group why they were exposing the detention situation. By that time I had read the CounterPunch article by Greg Moses on Jay’s efforts and was getting into it a bit more.

One interesting connection came up at the Saurday night movie: The film we watched is about the abuses by private contractors in Iraq, and the Raymondville Detention Center is also privately owned and operated. Another connection is that Halliburton got its contracts without real bidding…as did the contractors for Raymondville. (Source: Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 8/24/06)

On Sunday after the Unitarian Church event, Linda and I drove up to see Jay again. Dr. Asma Salam from Dallas had joined the group and a lawyer from Raymondville, both of whom I got email addresses for, to quote for a weekly column I write. (Both are really committed to the fight and well informed.) Jay was feeling upbeat and made a series of beautiful stump speeches for the press — I think three news media stopped by.

One theme he makes with true eloquence is that it should not be a crime to be an economic or political refugee. Why do we treat them as criminals for being oppressed and wanting to escape to America? Isn’t that what the poem on the Statue of Liberty is about?

Of most interest for me was simply the sight of the Raymondville Center. As you drive off of the highway to it — I was in the little caravan behind Jay — you see the bleak prison buildings. Altogether it is a bigger compound than I had pictured it. (Rolling Stone did a short, but sharp, expose of it last August.) It is located at the back of an older new prison…there are four prisons in Raymondville! That is the economy.

What horrified me were the rolls of barbed wire on top of all the fences. I was not close enough to tell if it was barbed wire or razor wire, but it makes my skin crawl to see that wire anyhow, and there was a lot of it. The compound has such a violent and cruel look. It just sits there sneering violently in a dry field.

Here is the way Matt Taibbi described the detention center in Rolling Stone (8/24/06):

The prison…”looks like something that just landed from Mars — a freaky looking phalanx of gleaming white, windowless,modular tentlike domes that, much in the spirit of our cheerfully bloodsucking modern American society, simultaneously recalls Auschwitz and Space Mountain.”

The Raymondville area was called the Valley of Tears in the late 1970s during an onion strike. After the strike, the growers got rid of the workers and the Raymondville area tried textiles to survive, but NAFTA killed that. Then the idea of making Raymondville “Prisonville” caught on. Wackenhut was the first of several to set roots there. And now Raymondville with its windowless tents, is a Valley of Tears for another reason.

I applaud Jay Johnson-Castro and his friends that I met. And I will try to stay in touch.

The following article was previously posted as a site announcement above.–gm

Scroll down or click here to get updates for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday iteneraries.

And if you are following Jay’s walk through cyberspace, here’s a little background reading on Rio Grande Valley culture. It’s the fresh issue of Laredos. Check it out.

Finally, adding to our list of peaceful type work that can be provided to the Rio Grande Valley, we’d like to add phone line technicians. We tried to call Jay Thursday night and got an “all circuits are busy” message. Sounds like they need something besides prisons down there.–gm

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez reference this article in their report on the boy they helped to free. Will Suzi be Next? Below, Isenberg says he’s working on it.–gm

Texas Samaritan for Canadian boy says he’ll help more kids detained in U.S.

BETH GORHAM

Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — Ralph Isenberg never met the nine-year-old Canadian boy he helped spring from a Texas immigration jail.

But the fate of Kevin Yourdkhani, who finally headed to Toronto on Wednesday with his Iranian parents, is still very personal for Isenberg, a wealthy Dallas property manager.

“I’m so happy. I pray to God that Canadians welcome that family home. Now it’s on to the next family.”
Mr. Isenberg, 55, who says he had his own immigration nightmare over the status of his Chinese wife, is determined to get all the kids out of the T. Don Hutto detention facility near Austin, Texas. He wants to force officials to shut it down.

“The conditions are atrocious,” Mr. Isenberg said from Dallas. “When I see an injustice where I can do something, I step right in. I’m not afraid of these bastards. To hell with ’em.”

A colourful, blunt-speaking businessman, Mr. Isenberg tears up when discussing how detainees have been treated by authorities.

He says the U.S. Immigration Control Enforcement is out of control. “They need to be put out of business.”

“You can’t allow a law-enforcement agency to have such power over all these foreign nationals. ICE in itself is creating terrorists of the future by jailing kids nine or 10 or 15 years old,” he said.

“I’ve seen the faces of the children who’ve been in there. Those kids are damaged goods.”

Kevin Yourdkhani was born in Canada. His parents lived in Toronto for 10 years before they were deported to Iran in 2005.

They were caught with fake passports by U.S. authorities in early February when they made an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico while en route to Canada to seek asylum for the second time.

They spent weeks in detention. Kevin, who was threatened with foster care, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and pleaded to be allowed to go home.

Last week, Ottawa granted the three a temporary residence permit.

Mr. Isenberg read about the boy’s case early on and stepped in, covering US$1,000 for travel permits and offering to pay the legal fees of the family’s Canadian lawyers.

While others are working on a lawsuit designed to close the facility, Isenberg works with individual families like Kevin’s.

“Somebody’s got to do it. You don’t need any more reason than it’s not right,” he says.

“It’s plain, pure and simple – not right. His was the most egregious case. He was literally kidnapped.”

“I don’t think our government understands what they did to that family.”

There is, though, a compelling reason for Mr. Isenberg’s activism and the money he devotes to it – his own battle over the status of his second wife, Nicole.

She had come to the United States in 1999 seeking political asylum. In 2003, by then Mr. Isenberg’s fiancee, she spent 52 days in the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell after authorities nabbed her for failing to attend a hearing.

The prison, a mix of hardened criminals and immigration cases, was “a hell hole out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Isenberg, with scant services or medical attention for detainees.

“All you have to do is experience the screams of your fiancee with an abscessed tooth, no one to help her.”

Nicole was eventually force to leave the United States. The couple and their baby had just returned in January from 14 months in China while they sorted out her case. She is now a legal permanent resident of the United States.

“I was in exile,” said Mr. Isenberg. “It was a terrible ordeal.”

It was after his return that he found out about the Hutto facility, opened last May by the Homeland Security Department.

“I went crazy when I heard about it,” he said.

“I may not have been in prison but I certainly know what this government is capable of doing to anyone and everyone.”

“If we do this to foreign nationals, it’s going to be us next.”

About half of some 400 people at Hutto are children. None of the detained have criminal records.

U.S. officials say the facility, and one like it in Pennsylvania, provide a humane way to keep families together while immigration laws are being enforced. Officials say this is what Congress directed them to do. But activists say legislators actually wanted the families held in home-like environments, not jails where they sleep in cells, wear prison garb and face major restrictions.

Mr. Isenberg helped secure the release last month of the Ibrahims, a Palestinian family held at Hutto since November on immigration violations.

When they got out, he sent a limousine to pick up Hanan and four of her five children. Their father was imprisoned hundreds of kilometres away while the family’s youngest, a three-year-old, stayed with an uncle.

Next, Mr. Isenberg is taking up the cause of three or four families who are Iraqi and Syrian.

And he’s hoping for the imminent release of Suzi Hazahza, 20, and her sister Mirvat from the same prison where his wife was once locked up.

Mr. Isenberg said it’s terrible to think about what U.S. officials did to Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was sent to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured.

“I think of that poor person at least once a week,” he said. “I’m kind of blessed. At least I haven’t been tortured.”

What would you consider a good reason to send a dozen armed police into a family home, arrest everyone age 11 to 60 and throw them in prison?

According to our source at the Dallas Federal Courthouse today, the reason turns out to be that the federal government claims it sent a letter to the father of the family asking him for a meeting to discuss his immigration status.
The federal magistrate judge presiding over the hearing asked if the feds sent the letter to everyone in the family? No, the letter was sent to the father only. Could the feds prove that they actually sent the letter to Radi Hazahza? No they could not.

“So this is why 15 people came with assault weapons into the Hazahza home, sticking gun barrels to their heads, arresting them and sending them to prison?” asks Jay Johnson-Castro, who stood vigil outside the Dallas federal courthouse Thursday morning.

He says courtroom observers described the magistrate as very distraught about the government’s case. The magistrate assured the US Attorney that if the Hazahzas lingered in prison past the six-month mark, the US Attorney would find himself ordered back to court to explain.

With about five weeks left until the six-month limit expires, some of the courthouse observers were hoping for an earlier release of the four Hazahzas who remain in the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas. Two of the Hazahzas were released from the T. Don Hutto prison earlier this year.

“If they keep the Hazahzas another month, that’s another seven-thousand-dollars per person that the prison camp gets to collect,” said Johnson-Castro in response to the day’s legal event.

“Everybody’s in agreement that what the US is doing is not legal,” he says. “The US Attorneys don’t want to defend the legality of these actions. But if what they are doing is not legal, then it’s illegal.”

Apparently one legal consequence of keeping this case at the level of “distraught magistrate” on Thursday is to evade an outright ruling by a federal judge, which would not be kind to this recent exercise of federal power. So why not free the Hazahzas on Friday?–gm