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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.”

He was among the first reporters to be notified of the plight of immigrant families at T. Don Hutto prision camp in Taylor, Texas. At last, his editors appear to have given him permission to give the story the coverage it deserves, perhaps because a federal judge last week expressed exasperation in open court. Below are the first few paragraphs of a comprehensive overview posted Sunday morning at statesman.com (subscription).–gm

Familial bonds

Is government’s policy to detain immigrant families fair?

By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 25, 2007

TAYLOR — Conversations with her mother and the son she left behind in Somalia because she feared for her life there. Visits to her grandmother’s tranquil vegetable garden. Walks past her grandparents’ house on her way home; they were always waiting to greet her.

These recurring images filled Bahjo Hosen’s dreams as she slept — with her 2-year-old son, Mustafa, curled up next to her — on a narrow metal bunk bed in a roughly 8-foot-by-12-foot cell with an open toilet and sink in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

On most mornings about 5:30, a guard’s rap on the door jarred Bahjo awake, drawing a dark curtain on her dreams and beginning another day of confinement while she and Mustafa pursued asylum in the U.S. immigration system’s slow-grinding bureaucracy.

“I never dreamed I would be in jail,” said Hosen, who fled a Somalian clan’s death threats, only to be locked up in the immigrant detention center in Taylor.

The former state prison is in the bull’s-eye of a growing controversy over a federal policy that requires families like Bahjo and Mustafa to be confined on immigration violations while they await outcomes of their asylum petitions or deportation. The waits can drag on for days, months, sometimes years.

The controversy raises two questions: Is it inhumane to confine children and families for running afoul of immigration laws? And are there better alternatives than locking people up?

Critics answer yes to both. Lawsuits filed on behalf of 10 children confined in Taylor accuse federal officials of illegally and inhumanely housing children, failing to meet the standards of a 1997 court settlement for the care of minors in immigration custody, and ignoring Congress’ orders to exhaust other options before detaining families — in homelike environments.

At a hearing on the lawsuits last week, even U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks expressed exasperation at the restrictions under which families are living at the Hutto facility.

“This is detention. This isn’t the penitentiary,” Sparks said. Detainees “have less rights than the people I send to the penitentiary.”

Sparks ordered that some restrictions on attorney visits with detainee clients be removed immediately. . . .

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

With the sounds of traffic swooshing by him, and accompanied by John Neck, Ken Koym, and Juan Torres, Jay Johnson-Castro kept walking as he gave the following update via cell phone. The reference to the federal judge comes from Juan Castillo’s story below in which Austin Federal Judge Sam Sparks is quoted as saying convicted felons have more rights than immigrant detainees. Here is what Jay says on the morning of the Raymondville vigil, scheduled for 1:00 pm.–gm

A lot of my suspicion is being reconfirmed after talking to the attorneys and a couple of fellow journalists. The newspapers here are basically anti-immigrant and we are not going to get any coverage down here.
I asked them is it political? Are political favors being asked? One said yes. The other said it was more due to apathy. They just quit covering stuff like that.

Looking at the big picture with the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, and the Rolling Plains prison at Haskell, then coming down here, we’re making gains.

If a federal judge sides with common sense and moral values of grassroots America, I guess some of us feel we’re on the right page. But really this is not about legal or illegal, it’s about moral or immoral, conscionable or unconscionable. The fact we made gains on Hutto means that layer by layer we are going to peel the onion back and get to the core of this thing.

I have also heard that the International Educational Services (IES) school is more kindly than it was two years ago when it was under immigration authorities. The kids do rotate through every 2-3 months, but nobody knows where they go.

At Raymondville, the biggest concern of attorneys is the lack of food. And that’s a result of running these camps for profit. The people are in windowless cells 23 hours a day.

They agreed the greatest vulnerability to ICE was the children in Hutto as far as exposing the source of this human tragedy. Which brings us back to the prisons for profit concept, and how the guarantees of prison detention boosted the stock value of these companies.

This is a time of darkness in our country’s history. Hopefully, it will be better exposed. What will it take to trigger outrage. Smokestacks? Who cares enough to skip breakfast or their favorite tv program before they say the people running these camps should not be committing these crimes or even be in power. That’s where we are at in all reality.

I love the little letter from Thailand. If in other places people are feeling a sense of what we feel, I consider it an accomplishment itself. Now, when do we get these things shut down?