Author: mopress

Statement delivered by Jane Van Praag to County Commissioners Court, Jan. 23, 2007. Also, see Daniel K. Lai’s report on the meeting for the Taylor Daily Press.

We understand that the contract between Williamson County and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is up for renewal on January 31.

I am here to express my opposition to the renewal of this contract.
It is a moral wrong to imprison children. It is morally wrong to imprison whole families with children without exhausting all the alternatives, which would allow families to stay together while ensuring immigrants attend their immigration hearing.

Even Congress, when appropriating the money for this facility, stated: “The Committee expects DHS to release families or use alternatives to detention such as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program whenever possible.” (House Report 109-079 – DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2006).

I urge the Commissioners’ Court to hold ICE accountable and request that ICE prove it is complying with what Congress intended. We need to know if ICE has exhausted all of the alternatives to detaining these children and families before you renew this contract.

There is only so much that can be done to the T. Don Hutto facility to make it more humane. At some point it becomes clear that it’s still a prison, with bars on the doors, where people are not free to go where they choose, and where children can only go outside at an assigned time.

That is why I am asking you to invite ICE to explain in a public and transparent way why the alternatives to imprisoning families in this way are not being used, before you renew this contract for another year.

If ICE needs more time than is available before the contract with CCA expires, I encourage you to extend the CCA contract for an additional 120 days only and give notice that you intend to terminate the contract with ICE unless ICE publicly explains what alternatives to prison they have tried and why they are not able to implement any of the alternatives to imprisonment.

The voters of Williamson County deserve to know that the federal facilities in their county are operated consistent with what Congress intended.

Email from Riad Hamad, Jan. 23, 2007. Materials about the Suleimans have been archived here at the Texas Civil Rights Review.

Adel Suleiman was born in a refugee camp, and the USA will return him to refugee status in Jordan, along with his spouse and twin daughters. He is not fighting the deportation, because he finds it preferable to the jail torture that he has been experiencing since his abduction Nov. 2 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With deep sadness we ask, will Texas media NEVER mention this family’s name?
Racism is the plain and simple explanation for this family’s treatment at the hands of USA authorities and for the lack of care demonstrated by paid professionals in the media establishment. Media resources can always be found to tell stories about Ted Nugent’s attire. Yet, while pundits fret about confederate flag symbolism, the practical confederacy lives on. Shame, shame, shame.–gm

Dear friends,

As you know Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund has been assisting the Palestinian families in the Hutto detention center through the payment of some of their legal fees, meals in the center and phone cards. We just received a phone call from one of the families advising us that the immigration authorities just informed them that they will be deported to Jordan on Monday.

The family of Adel Suleiman and Asma Qadoura will leave the United States on Monday via Dallas and their young twin girls ages 4 will accompany them. Both girls are United States citizens and were staying with their aunt in Irving pending the end of this nightmare that started November 3rd, 2006.

PCWF contributed to the legal fees incurred by their competent and compassionate lawyer, Mr. John Wheat Gibons and will be paying for the airline tickets of the two children who will have to leave with their parents next week.

PCWF would like to encourage you to contribute to the purchase of the airlines tickets of these two children to avoid separating them from their famiy. You can send your contribution to the address listed on the bottom of this email or you can donate online and specify that you want the money to go towards the Palestinian families in Hutto.

Additionally, PCWF will continue to provide support for the remaining two families till their legal cases are resolved. We are aware that the Ibrahim family can not leave the United States yet since the Isreali and the Jordanian governments refused to accept them or allow them to go back. You will receive more information as it becomes available and will try to update you about their status promptly. We will also be glad to provide you with the contact information for the families if you wish to help them directly if you have any doubts regarding the destination of your donation

Looking forward to hearing from you and THANKS again for your generosity, work and support for the children in Palestine.

Salamat
Riad Hamad

http://www.pcwf.org, http://www.paypalestine.com, Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund. 201 W. Stassney # 201, Austin, Texas 78745

Click to buy Palestinian arts and crafts online, sponsor a Palestinian child ,buy a flag or a kufiya, donate a book to teach one or plant an olive/ orange tree in Palestine to honor a loved one

Commentary

On Dec. 15, 2006 Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson wrote an email to a Texas reporter explaining that some of the families imprisoned at the T. Don Hutto jail for immigrants had in fact entered the USA legally with visas.

We are grateful that Gibson’s email was circulated on Dec. 18 by Del Rio businessman Jay Johnson-Castro, because otherwise there is a good chance nobody would know about three Palestinian families who are serving terms of indefinite jail time in Texas (and Oklahoma) jails.
On the other hand, try a news search at Google for the key words Perry and Confederate. We tried the search this morning and got 101 hits. If you want to get real attention from Texas media, just put on a Confederate flag t-shirt and play your guitar at the governor’s inauguration.

And so we offer profound apologies to the three Palestinian families–Ibrahim, Suleiman, and Hazahza–for the awful neglect and abuse that they continue to suffer at the hands of officials and reporters in Texas.

Word comes now that two USA citizens–the 4-year-old twin daughters of the Suleiman family–will shortly be deported with their parents, because the USA has not a heart big enough to share with this refugee family. We hope out loud that in the next few days, someone with authority and compassion will lift a finger to change these things.

Meanwhile, we are grievously dismayed by the Governor. When the Governor was informed that people were offended by the display of a confederate flag at his inaugural ball, what did he do? He called the person who displayed the flag in order to commiserate and communicate his solidarity.

We would much prefer a government in Texas that did not imprison children, a media that did not ignore international refugees, and a Governor who would pick up the phone and apologize to Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe. But we have none of these things.

In this seventh year of the 21st Century, we have only the same old news, made increasingly worse by our expectations that things should have gotten better by now.–gm

The governor also called over the weekend, ending the conversation by telling Nugent to “give ’em hell,” Nugent was quoted as saying.–AP

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / UrukNet / ElectronicIntifada /
IndyBay / DissidentVoice

“A man without a country,” is what Judge Maryanne Trump Barry called the hapless stowaway, Salim Yassir, who was born in Palestine, exiled to Libya, and jailed in the USA. Four years after foiling Yassir’s 2000 attempt to enter the USA, immigration authorities were still claiming they should keep him in jail while they looked for a country that would take him. But Judge Barry (the Donald’s older sister) put an end to that legal purgatory in 2004 when she ruled that a man without a country has rights, too. Yassir could just as easily live outside jail while authorities pursued their executive agendas.

In some ways Yassir’s story is similar to one now being lived by three Texas families of Palestinian heritage. They are people without a country. From Palestine they have fled to the USA, sometimes through other countries. Immigration authorities have denied them asylum, ordered them deported, and they are being jailed indefinitely in legal purgatory while some country is found to take them.

But the Texas families are not stowaways. They entered the USA with visas and have always lived public lives in their pursuit of asylum in the USA, growing their opportunities and their families along the way. The Ibrahim family, for example, arrived with four children, gave birth to a fifth, and are expecting a sixth. For the Ibrahim children who have lived in Palestine, memories are not so good, and they fear going back to a place where they are subject to so many military assaults.
Maryam Ibrahim was about two years old in 2000 when a gas canister crashed into her Palestinian home, rendering her unconscious for lack of breath. Pleading to USA authorities for asylum in 2002, Maryam’s father Salaheddin testified that his little girl was fearful of people in uniform. Yet USA authorities have denied asylum and placed Maryam in jail where family members say she is not allowed to run indoors or go outdoors, and where every night at 10 p.m. she is ordered into a cell separate from where her pregnant mother is being kept. Frequently, Maryam cries.
Maryam shares the overnight cell with older sister Rodaina, while younger sister Faten shares a cell with mother Hanan. Family members confirm reports that Hanan is not getting medical attention for her pregnancy, placing Maryam’s little brother-to-be at risk.

Despite a near blackout from corporate media–who will often report about Hutto protest actions without mentioning the Palestinians–these three Texas families are attracting supporters, activists, and attorneys from near and far. On Thursday evening, Texas activists joined local residents in a third vigil outside the T. Don Hutto prison camp for immigrant families. Thanks to public documents obtained by Williamson County Sun reporter Ben Trollinger, folks were able to determine that a county lease arrangement with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) would expire next Wednesday, Jan. 31.

“It is a moral wrong to imprison children,” said county resident Jane Van Praag to the Williamson County Commissioners Court last Tuesday, making points she expects to repeat next Tuesday, the day before the lease with CCA expires. “It is morally wrong to imprison whole families with children without exhausting all the alternatives, which would allow families to stay together while ensuring immigrants attend their immigration hearing.”

Meanwhile, the education of jailed children became an issue this week when the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that hours of instruction had been increased from one to four since protests began in mid-December. Yet the increase was not enough to satisfy attorneys from the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) who have threatened to sue very soon if instruction is not increased to seven hours as mandated by state law. TCRP attorneys (with whom I work part time) have been busy with Williamson County schools lately, providing pro bono defenses for a hundred school children prosecuted by the Round Rock school district for attending historic immigrant-rights marches instead of classes last Spring.

At the Thursday vigil, people continued to talk about a broader agenda of resistance, not only closing the Hutto children’s prison, but every such prison in the USA. South Texas entrepreneur Jay J. Johnson-Castro, who discovered the expiration date in the lease between CCA and the county, carries around a liberally highlighted copy of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“Every right of the child that other countries have ratified is being violated at Hutto,” said Johnson-Castro. “This is international law that the US wouldn’t agree to. The international community has higher standards than the USA. And the reason is so the USA can do whatever it wants with impunity.”

As a result of treatyless impunity, children from all three families continue to suffer. Zahra Ibrahim, the fifth child mentioned above–and a USA citizen–has been prevented from seeing her pregnant mother since the two were separated upon arrest in early November.

Likewise with the 4-year-old citizen twin daughters of Adel Suleiman and Asma Quddoura. Adel, the father who was born into a Palestinian refugee camp 61 years ago, is now pleading for speedy deportation to end his solitary confinement in an Oklahoma City jail. Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson says the solitary time is apparent retaliation for Suleiman’s public complaints about smelly and risky conditions in another Oklahoma County jail. Following Suleiman’s wishes, Gibson has dropped any actions that would delay the Suleiman family’s removal, including the deportation of the 4-year-old twin citizens. The deportation could come Monday, says Riad Hamad of the Texas-based Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund, who has been raising money to support the families and their legal fees.

As for the Hazahza family, information is more tightly guarded by the family attorney, but we have learned that when Ahmad recently turned 18 in a Haskell, Texas immigration prison, he was not removed from solitary confinement. Ahmad is the only member of these families that has been cited for having a criminal record–burglary convictions–although the original press release about his arrest curiously misstated his age in order to make him look like an adult.

The criminal treatment of all these families’ children would end, says Johnson-Castro, if the Convention on the Rights of the Child were adopted by the USA.

“It’s time for Congress to show what they are made of,” says Johnson-Castro. “There is an element within the Republican party committing this atrocity and profiting from it. We’re insisting that it stop now.”

Johnson-Castro will return to the Hutto jail for a fourth vigil on Feb. 12 as part of the Marcha Migrante II border caravan that will travel from San Diego to Brownsville and back. He may also toss in a demonstration at nearby Round Rock in solidarity with the prosecuted student marchers.

Border mayors from Texas are supporting the caravan, says Johnson-Castro. And this, according to Steve Taylor of the Rio Grande Guardian, is a better response from the mayors than Johnson-Castro got during his first border walk, just prior to the November 2006 elections.

The border mayors don’t want a wall, and they are not happy about the Texas Governor’s Jan. 22 announcement to send 600 armed National Guard for border patrol duties. Joh
nson-Castro
says the border mayors were also dismayed by President George W. Bush’s Jan. 23 pledge to double the border guard.

“President Bush and Secretary Chertoff represent the heart of America as much as Governor Perry and Ted Nugent represent the heart of Texas,” said Johnson-Castro.

Ted Nugent rocked himself into a ring of this political circus when he wore a confederate-flag t-shirt to his performance at the inaugural ball of the Texas Governor. Nugent denies that he made anti-immigrant remarks, too. As for the Texas Governor Rick Perry, when he heard that the confederate flag was not appreciated by Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe, the Governor made a phone call. But he didn’t call Bledsoe to apologize. Instead, he called Nugent to commiserate. It’s enough to make a fellow ashamed that the Governor is from Texas.

As post-election politics reverts to Civil War for everyone all over again, word comes that Yankee lawyers will be coming down to reinforce the struggle for Constitutional principles in Texas–even when applied to children without a country. Which is why we are reading the Yassir decision in the first place. Stay tuned. Yassir v. Ashcroft in pdf format