Feb 21, 2007 10:47 pm US/Central
Family Seeking Freedom Held In Detention Center
Jay Gormley
Reporting
(CBS 11 News) IRVING CBS 11 News has an update on the release of a Palestinian woman and her son from a detention center near Austin. While mother and son are back in Irving, the rest of her family remains in another detention facility in west Texas.
“That’s the love of my life,” said Reza Barkhordari. “That’s my future.” Reza was supposed to marry Suzan Hazahza this past December….
Note: the following summary of a habeas corpus writ prepared for filing in a Dallas federal court Wednesday has been incorporated into the story about the Texas Independence Day protest below.–gm
According to the habeas writ that will be filed Wednesday, the Hazazha family arrived in the USA with temporary visas during the summer of 2001 and applied for political asylum. Once the appeals for asylum had been exhausted, the family was placed under a warrant of deportation in the summer of 2005, but the family was never notified.
Suzi’s mother Juma and youngest brother Mohammad were released Feb. 6 from the Hutto jail only days before a media tour of that facility. But on Feb. 12 ICE filed notice that it intended to keep the rest of the family imprisoned at Haskell as “flight risks.” Meanwhile, Jordan refuses to take the family back. Palestine and Israel have declined to reply to requests for deportation there.
At Haskell prison, lawyers say housing units meant to house eight prisoners are frequently supplemented with sleeping bags or “boats” that allow for ten to fourteen prisoners to spend the night. When inspectors arrive, the “boats” are hidden from view.
When it comes to culturally appropriate food for Muslims, the only thing the facility offers is eggs, which are served for breakfast, lunch, and supper. At prayer, the Hazahzas report they have been mocked by guards and threatened with suspension of prayer privileges.
Lawyers are only allowed to visit with prisoners for thirty minutes at a time, and only “within regular hearing distance of a stationed guard.” The three Hazahza men have never been allowed to live together “despite written requests to be united in the same, or adjacent, pods.”
17-year-old Ahmad Hazahza was placed in solitary confinement for three months because he was a minor in an adult facility. When Ahmad began urinating blood shortly after his arrival, guards mocked his medical condition and “told him that he was ‘probably dying’ of a disease and that there was nothing that could be done to save him.” For ten days, his requests to see a doctor were denied.
Both Suzi and her 23-year-old sister Mirvat spent the first 48 hours at Haskell sleeping on cement floors of a drunk tank, because no beds were available. They both ran high fevers for two weeks after that, and were also denied requests to see a doctor.
The sisters were “strip searched” each time they met with an outside visitor, including humiliating inspections that took place in full view of male guards “on multiple occasions.” When taken to the recreation area, they were made to “walk the gauntlet” in front of male prisoners who sexually harassed them with techniques that included exhibition and public masturbation while guards laughed.
As with the attorneys’ previous Habeas Corpus motion filed in behalf of the Ibrahim family, Bardavid and Cox argue that ICE has no legal authority to arrest or detain the family; therefore, the five Hazahzas should be immediately released.
Habeas Writ Details Allegations of Sexual Harassment, Medical Neglect, Overcrowding, and Isolation Techniques at Haskell
By Greg Moses
IndyMedia Austin , Houston / CounterPunch / DissidentVoice
There are different kinds of angry. Jay Johnson-Castro has tears in his eyes when he thinks about Suzi Hazahza at the immigration prison of Haskell, Texas.
But he’s not going to cry without doing something, so next week, Johnson-Castro will walk sixty miles from Abilene to Haskell and hold a vigil for the release of Suzi Hazahza and “anyone else” being mistreated for their desire to be American.
“I’m almost in tears trying to tell you how angry I feel,” says Johnson-Castro via cell phone as he drives home to Del Rio, Texas on Tuesday evening following three weeks of border protests.
He’s talking now about 20-year-old Suzi Hazahza and how she was subjected to body searches so humiliating that she has refused all visitors since early December. In a federal habeas corpus brief that will be filed Wednesday in Dallas, lawyers allege that both Suzi and her 23-year-old sister Mirvat have been subjected to repeated humiliations at the hands of prison guards. And according to Suzi’s fiance, the searches got even worse after his fifth visit when Suzi called begging not to be visited again.
“I can”t believe a fellow American would do that to anybody,” says Johnson-Castro. “But I’m afraid that’s the policy not the exception.”
Dallas real-estate developer Ralph Isenberg has seen the pattern before. It happened to his wife in Haskell under similar circumstances. She was imprisoned for immigration violations stemming from “bad lawyering” and once Isenberg started making noise about things he didn’t like at Haskell, his wife, too, was subjected to a full body-cavity search. To this day, he recalls the sound of the scream that the search provoked.
In protest of Suzi Hazahza’s treatment and confinement, Johnson-Castro will begin his freedom walk in Abilene on Wednesday, Feb. 28, arriving at the Rolling Plains prison in Haskell for a vigil on Texas Independence Day, March 3.
Ralph Isenberg says he’ll host Johnson-Castro in Dallas prior to the walk and introduce him to some people he has helped to free. During the walk, Isenberg pledges to join Johnson-Castro for a time, and if he can get enough people together, Isenberg plans to meet Johnson-Castro at the Haskell prison on Texas Independence Day with a bus full of people from Dallas.
“The good people of Haskell have no cognizance of what’s happening to sweet innocents such as Suzi Hazahza,” says Johnson-Castro. “And when they find out, they will rise up like the people of Williamson County did against the Hutto jail.”
Outrage at the jailing of children at the T. Don Hutto immigration jail keeps growing, joined this week by Dallas Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and the chair of the House subcommittee on immigration Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). Both of them told WFAA reporter Brett Shipp that child imprisonment is flat wrong, period.
And grassroots distaste for immigrant jailings sparked a new protest Tuesday from honor students of Fort Worth’s Tarrant County Community College who are angry that a wonderful fellow student has also been tossed into Haskell jail for “bad lawyering.”
The Fort Worth protest for 19-year-old immigration prisoner Samantha Windschitt was covered by two Metroplex television networks, which is a story in itself.
“The good news is that all the insane things that have been happening in a disconnected way are finally being connected,” says long-time immigration activist Isenberg, reflecting on the protest and news coverage.
“I honest to gosh believe that everything we have done up to now is adding up to something bigger,” says Johnson-Castro, who helped ignite protest in mid-December with a walk from Austin to the Hutto prison. In Haskell, he plans to make the most of the date and place.
“It’s Texas Independence Day and it’s the Governor’s home town,” he says. “We’re going to be looking for freedom for people who are trying to be Americans. And we are going to Gov. Rick Perry’s hometown and free the people that need to be freed, and not incarcerate them so that someone can make a profit.”
The Rolling Plains immigration jail in Haskell is managed by the Emerald Companies of Louisiana (see: emeraldcompanies.com).
Meanwhile, New York attorneys Joshua Bardavid and Ted Cox are scheduled to arrive in Dallas Wednesday morning to file federal habeas corpus motions in behalf of Suzi, Mirvat, their father, and two brothers, who have all been held at Haskell since “armed and armored officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a middle of the night ‘raid’ ” of their home on November 2.
According to the habeas writ that will be filed Wednesday, the Hazazha family arrived in the USA with temporary visas from Jordan during the summer of 2001, and they applied for political asylum. Once the appeals for asylum had been exhausted, the family was placed under a warrant of deportation in the summer of 2005, but the family was not notified about the warrant until they were abducted during pre-election immigration raids known as “Operation Return to Sender.”
Suzi’s mother Juma and youngest brother Mohammad were released Feb. 6 from the Hutto jail only days before a media tour of that facility. But on Feb. 12 ICE filed notice that it intended to keep the rest of the family imprisoned at Haskell as “flight risks.” Where they would flee to is a good question since Jordan refuses to take the family back, while Palestine and Israel have declined to reply to requests for deportation there.
At Haskell prison, lawyers say housing units meant to house eight prisoners are frequently supplemented with sleeping bags or “boats” that allow for ten to fourteen prisoners to spend the night. When inspectors arrive, the “boats” are hidden from view.
When it comes to culturally appropriate food for Muslims, the prison serves eggs for breakfast, lunch, and supper. At prayer, the Hazahzas report they have been mocked by guards and threatened with suspension of prayer privileges.
Lawyers are only allowed to visit with prisoners for thirty minutes at a time, and only “within regular hearing distance of a stationed guard.” The three Hazahza men have never been allowed to live together “despite written requests to be united in the same, or adjacent, pods.”
17-year-old Ahmad Hazahza was placed in solitary confinement for three months because he was a minor at Haskell’s adults-only facility. When Ahmad began urinating blood shortly after his arrival, guards mocked his medical condition and “told him that he was ‘probably dying’ of a disease and that there was nothing that could be done to save him.” For ten days, his requests to see a doctor were denied.
Suzi and Mirvat spent the first 48 hours at Haskell sleeping on the concrete floor of a drunk tank, because no beds were available. They both ran high fevers for two weeks after that, and were also denied requests to see a doctor.
The sisters were “strip searched” each time they met with an outside visitor, including humiliating inspections that took place in full view of male guards “on multiple occasions.” When taken to the recreation area, they were made to “walk the gauntlet” in front of male prisoners who sexually harassed them with techniques that included exhibition and public masturbation–while guards laughed.
The prison population at Haskell is a mix of immig
rant detainees from Texas and felony convicts imported from Wyoming.
As with the attorneys’ previous habeas corpus motion filed in behalf of the Ibrahim family, Bardavid and Cox argue that ICE has had no legal authority to arrest or detain the family; therefore, the five Hazahzas should be immediately released.
Another family released from both Hutto and Haskell following the last Texas visit by Bardavid and Cox have been spending time on Isenberg’s schedule these days. Isenberg says he’s helping the Ibrahim family put together their immigration petitions so that they can stay and work. He says working with the family took several hours Tuesday. It’s not the first time he’s said that. And the way things look, it won’t be the last time–not for weeks to come.
We don’t buy into the scary, Lou Dobbs paradigm, but we do appreciate the coverage that Accuracy in Media has given to a recent conference on emerging efforts to create a North American Community.
As we read the tea leaves, a North American Community is the drift of continental elites, and a serious contradiction to the logic of walls. The Trans Texas Corridor is not being planned for nothing.
Source: http://www.keeptexasmoving.org
The question is: how are elite powers planning to sustain hyper-velocities of container traffic while they continue to militarize barriers against the free movement of American peoples?
In an email on Monday, a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous compiled a set of recent readings on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which should be required reading for those audiences who love to suggest that Mexicans should solve their own problems at home before trekking Northward: FURTHER READING ON NAFTA:
A must-read NYT op-ed by Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who was also Bill Clinton’s chief economic advisor, titled “The Broken Promise of NAFTA”:
The celebrations of Nafta’s 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped.
…Growth in Mexico over the past 10 years has been a bleak 1 percent on a per capita basis — better than in much of the rest of Latin America, but far poorer than earlier in the century. From 1948 to 1973, Mexico grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent per capita. (By contrast, in the 10 years of Nafta, even with the East Asian crisis, Korean growth averaged 4.3 percent and China’s 7 percent in per capita terms.)
And while the hope was that Nafta would reduce income disparities between the United States and its southern neighbor, in fact they have grown — by 10.6 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, there has been disappointing progress in reducing poverty in Mexico, where real wages have been falling at the rate of 0.2 percent a year.
…In the long run, while particular special-interest groups may benefit from such an unfair trade treaty, America’s national interests — in having stable and prosperous neighbors — are not well served. Already, the manner in which the United States is bullying the weaker countries of Central and South America into accepting its terms is generating enormous resentment. If these trade agreements do no better for them than Nafta has done for Mexico, then both peace and prosperity in the hemisphere will be at risk.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2004/0106stiglitznafta.htm
An introspective op-ed by Brad Delong, a “Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley” and “Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration,” titled “Has Neo-Liberalism Failed Mexico?”:
Six years ago, I was ready to conclude that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a major success. The key argument in favor of NAFTA had been that it was the most promising road the United States could take to raise the chances for Mexico to become democratic and prosperous, and that the US had both a strong selfish interest and a strong neighborly duty to try to help Mexico develop.
…But the 3.6% rate of growth of GDP, coupled with a 2.5% per year rate of population and increase, means that Mexicans’ mean income is barely 15% above that of the pre-NAFTA days, and that the gap between their mean income and that of the US has widened. Because of rising inequality, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans live no better off than they did 15 years ago. (Indeed, the only part of Mexican development that has been a great success has been the rise in incomes and living standards that comes from increased migration to the US, and increased remittances sent back to Mexico.)
Intellectually, this is a great puzzle: we believe in market forces, and in the benefits of trade, specialization, and the international division of labor. We see the enormous increase in Mexican exports to the US over the past decade. We see great strengths in the Mexican economy – a stable macroeconomic environment, fiscal prudence, low inflation, little country risk, a flexible labor force, a strengthened and solvent banking system, successfully reformed poverty-reduction programs, high earnings from oil, and so on.
Yet successful neo-liberal policies have not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neo-liberals like me would have confidently predicted had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply five-fold in the next twelve years.
An excellent WP column by Harold Meyerson titled “NAFTA and Nativism”:
Over 40 percent of the Mexicans who have come, legally and illegally, to the United States have done so in the past 15 years. The boom in undocumenteds is even more concentrated than that: There were just 2.5 million such immigrants in the United States in 1995; fully 8 million have arrived since then.
Why? It’s not because we’ve let down our guard at the border; to the contrary, the border is more militarized now than it’s ever been. The answer is actually simpler than that. In large part, it’s NAFTA.
…But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, could not have been more precisely crafted to increase immigration — chiefly because of its devastating effect on Mexican agriculture…From 1993 through 2002, at least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020701272_pf.html
A critical op-ed by Jeff Faux, who is the founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, titled “NAFTA’s Failure and the Increasingly Desperate Mexican Economy”:
Thirteen years ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico over a less-protected border was half of what it is today, we were assured that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would transform Mexico into a prosperous middle-class society. “There will be less illegal immigration,” promised President Bill Clinton, “because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.” Mexican president Carlos Salinas told Americans it was a choice between getting Mexican tomatoes or tomato-pickers.
But NAFTA did not deliver. Mexico has grown too slowly to create enough jobs for its people, and the benefits of trade have largely gone to the wealthy, making it one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Moreover, the agreement flooded Mexico with highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian grain, driving between 1 and 2 million Mexican farmers off the land and adding to the supply of desperate Mexicans looking for work.
FURTHER READING ON THE EVILS OF AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES:
Must-read Stiglitz op-ed titled “The Tyranny of King Cotton”:
Americans like to think that if poor countries simply open up their markets, greater prosperity will follow. Unfortunately, where agriculture is concerned, this is mere rhetoric. The United States pays only lip service to free market principles, favoring Washington lobbyists and campaign contributors who demand just the opposite. Indeed, it is America’s own agricultural subsidies that helped kill, at least for now, the so-called Doha Development Round of trade negotiations that were supposed to give poor countries new opportunities to enhance their growth.
Subsidies hurt developing country farmers because th
ey lead to higher output – and lower global prices. The Bush administration – supposedly committed to free markets around the world – has actually almost doubled the level of agricultural subsidies in the US.Cotton illustrates the problem. Without subsidies, it would not pay for Americans to produce much cotton; with them, the US is the world’s largest cotton exporter. Some 25,000 rich American cotton farmers divide $3 to $4 billion in subsidies among themselves – with most of the money going to a small fraction of the recipients. The increased supply depresses cotton prices, hurting some 10 million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa alone.
Seldom have so few done so much damage to so many.
Very disturbing NYT story titled “On India’s Farms, a Plague of Suicide”:
Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.
…Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.
Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.
WP A1 story titled “In Mexico, ‘People Do Really Want to Stay’” and subtitled “Chicken Farmers Fear U.S. Exports Will Send More Workers North for Jobs”:
But now, Martin worries that life in the central Mexican state of Jalisco is about to be shaken by globalization. Already much of Mexico’s farm country has been overwhelmed by an influx of crops from the United States in the years following the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over the next two years, the final provisions of the trade pact kick in, opening Mexico to unlimited imports of poultry from its northern neighbor. Mexican farms will compete directly with an American agribusiness nurtured by subsidies on the corn that feeds the birds.
“If a lot of chicken comes in from the United States, we’re not going to be able to maintain our farms,” said Martin, 39. “What’s going to happen? People are going to get fired. People are going to go north.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/06/AR2007010601265.html
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