Category: Uncategorized

By Nick Braune

Here is a small incident, but another sign of the militarization of the border. Last Monday, April 23, Amy Goodman, a nationally respected reporter (“Democracy Now”), made a fast stop at South Texas College for a presentation on the media. Having a bit of time before flying out, she asked if she could be driven over to Raymondville to get some pictures of the immigration detention tents she had heard about. She was not planning anything public or planning on going in for interviews, or anything like that. But apparently, the car she was in got too close to the tents and she and the other passengers in a car were met by a man in a CCA (Corrections Corporation of America ) uniform holding a rifle (shotgun?) at their car and yelling at them. Jennifer Clark, who is a political science instructor and a leader in the Women’s Studies Committee at South Texas College , was driving the car.

Author: Jenny. Please tell me what happened at the fascistic Raymondville Detention Center last Monday. Did they know it was Amy Goodman?

Clark : I don’t think they knew it was her, I was driving in my car: Amy and I were in the front and John Jones [a progressive political scientist who runs Virtual Citizens, an internet newsletter] and Denis Moynihan (Amy’s outreach coordinator) were in the back. The guard in the truck came from nowhere and drove at us fast, stopping an inch or so from my car totally cutting me off from moving any further. He said that he thought we were “escaping” from the facility which did not make sense as we were driving towards not away. He literally escorted us off the premises with his gun pointed at us the whole time. There was no warning at all. When we got to the front gate a Raymondville police car had arrived. He accused us of trespassing and asked if we had not read the sign. We had not read seen the sign as we had approached the side of the facility.

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From Democracy Now! transcript, April 27, 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, I went down to Raymondville, Texas, to this vast tent detention camp right behind a prison. As soon as we got there, we were met by the security, and they cocked their guns at us, one of the men in the pickup truck saying we got to get off the property now. We reported on the Jonathan Hutto facility, where kids are held, hundreds of kids — the ACLU is suing now — and talked to a nine-year-old boy named Kevin, who said, “I just want to go home. I just want to be free.” What about these prisons?

DAVID BACON: Well, the Bush administration is privatizing the enforcement of immigration law. They’re building huge detention facilities, which are run by private corporations, like Halliburton, for instance. Halliburton has started to build these. And this is part of the increased enforcement program that the Bush administration has. This is sort of like the flipside of the guestworker programs, to say — you know, to try and negotiate or to establish new guestworker programs to bring people to the US as contract workers, and for anybody who’s not part of that program, to begin to arrest people, detain people, as we’re seeing in these raids, put them into these kinds of — you know, I would say they’re close to concentration camps, really, but that are also sort of private business giveaways to Bush cronies.

Dear Greg,

What is your point? Should this and all nations of the world simply throw open their borders and let total chaos rule? Besides outsourcing and the idiot lifestyle acculturation of the average American today,
can’t you see that a laissez-faire immigration policy would cause the American middle class to die a quicker death than it is presently dying?
Can’t you see that multiculturalism is a failed policy encouraging only violence, hate, and social schism? Rather than promoting “diversity”, multiculturalism actually kills world wide diversity by breeding an undefined mass of anational individuals, torn from the nurturing womb of the blood and the soil that was truly theirs in their native lands. And the illusion is that they all come to
America to be “Americans”. The reality instead is that they all become hyphenated Americans. This country is already turning into a morass of hyphenations – each culture suspicious of the other and virtually
nonrecognizable vis-a-vis one another.

Through no desire of my own, I arrived in this country from Southern Europe at four years of age – the worst disaster in my life. Almost immediately, I was accosted by other established “ethnics”, blacks included and often especially, as a spic, a greenhorn, portagee. From my earliest years onward, I had little desire to become part of this supposed deracinated conglomeration of abstract Platonic entities that
supposedly bear no connection to race, nationality, language, religion, and native culture. And these same sentiments are echoed daily, yearly, and generationally by disturbed deracinated and hence emasculated youth who cry out with guns, knives, and drugs against the absurdity of this supposedly noble “social experiment”.

If you truly want to help immigrants, you don’t do it by trying to convince America’s native sons that they ought to feel pity upon the disadvantaged dregs of the earth who want to land in America and find their easy place in the sun. You do it by sending them back home, to put their houses in order, to create wealth in their own lands, and to compete effectively, on all levels, with the supposed North American masters of this world.

Regards….ABrito

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Dear ABrito, This morning I went to cash a paycheck. Standing in line, counting fifty people in front of me, then later fifty people behind me, I just don’t know what you mean by an easy place in the sun. Likewise I’m not following what the people around me had to do with the demise of the middle class, except that they didn’t look middle class yet, but would probably achieve it if left alone. As for multiculturalism, I beg to differ, it is one thing that redeems us. Multiculturalism reminds us that no matter how hyphenated a cultural identity may be, it belongs to a human being with human rights. Nevertheless, in consideration of the gap between our assumptions, I do appreciate thoughtful expressions of dissent, and I am happy to post your letter as food for my own thought.–gm

PS: As for the argument that people should try to live where they can solve their own problems, I think moving to the USA is for many people–such as Mexican corn farmers–exactly the place they need to be voting for more humane trade policies.

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