Category: Uncategorized

From today’s Austin American Statesman:

Charles Laws, a water company executive whom local officials are calling on to resign, on Friday defended his decision to characterize a proposed detention facility for illegal immigrants as a “holding pen for w*tbacks.”

Laws said “w*tback” is widely acknowledged to mean immigrants who swim the Rio Grande and enter the United States illegally, not American citizens. Laws said the term is not racial, an assertion that others dispute. He said he wishes he had not used the word in an agenda item for the Creedmoor-Maha Water Supply Corp.’s board of directors but will not resign over it.

From yesterday’s KLBJ News:

According to Laws and other Mustang Ridge city officials, the proposal is to build a 1,000 bed facility that would employ approximately 200 people. Laws says the firm is interested in being within 30 miles of the Austin Bergstrom Airport, so that the detainees could be flown back to their countries of origin.

City officials tell us the proposal is to build a family detention center, much like the T Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, which is run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). That facility is run by the private jail firm to house immigrants and their children who have been detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers.

According to attorneys who represent people held in T Don Hutto, some of the detainees say they are in the U.S. seeking asylum from persecution. The large majority of the immigrants are not from Mexico or South America. Many are from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Canada. The roughly 400 adults and children are held in the facility until their on-going immigration hearings are complete. Williamson County is named as the administrator of that contract, and receives a fee per inmate per day.

In December of 2007, Emerald made a proposal to the Caldwell County Commissioners Court to build a facility in north-east Caldwell County, between Lytton Springs and Dale.

You read it here first. See Jay J. Johnson-Castro’s Christmas letter to the President–gm

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Press Release
February 22, 2008

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD ANNOUNCES OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL JUDICIAL NOMINATION OF CCA GENERAL COUNSEL GUS PURYEAR

On June 13, 2007, President Bush nominated Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV for a position on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Mr. Puryear currently serves as vice president and general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit private prison company. If appointed he would serve as a federal judge in the same jurisdiction where CCA is headquartered.

Since 2000, at least 260 federal lawsuits naming CCA, company subsidiaries or CCA employees have been filed in the Middle District of Tennessee. Such cases would constitute a conflict of interest for Mr. Puryear, and assigning them to other judges would not be an effective use of judicial resources.

Of greater concern is that Mr. Puryear lacks familiarity with the federal courts and has little trial or litigation experience. By his own admission he has tried only two cases to verdict; he has been personally involved in only five federal cases, most recently a decade ago. He is not admitted to practice before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is over the Middle District of Tennessee, and received only a “qualified” rating from the American Bar Association rather than a “highly qualified” rating.

Both Tennessee Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker strongly support Mr. Puryear’s nomination. Neither Senator has acknowledged the substantial financial contributions received from Mr. Puryear and his employer, CCA – which include over $80,000 to Senator Alexander and $27,000 to Senator Corker since 2004.

Further, Mr. Puryear mentioned in disclosure statements that he is a member of the Nashville-based Belle Meade Country Club. The fact that Mr. Puryear maintains membership in an exclusive, predominately white club that did not admit its first minority member until 1994, and reportedly does not afford voting privileges to female members but only to male members, is a matter of significant concern for a federal judicial nominee.

In an Associated Press national wire article concerning Mr. Puryear’s nomination, Vanderbilt Professor Stefanie Lindquist was quoted as saying his judicial appointment “might slide through as a compromise.” The National Lawyers Guild does not believe the people of Tennessee should have to compromise or settle for a less-than-qualified federal judge to represent their interests in U.S. District Court.

The National Lawyers Guild calls on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to vote down this unqualified, conflicted and controversial judicial candidate.

The UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights of Migrants, Jorge Bustamante, conducted an official tour of the USA in April and May of 2007. A report on that visit was released to the Human Rights Council on March 7, 2008. Below are sample findings from the report and a directory to sections of the report as archived here at the Texas Civil Rights Review.–gm

118. Children should be removed from jail-like detention centres and placed in home-like facilities. Due care should be given to rights delineated for children in custody in the American Bar Association “Standards for the Custody, Placement, and Care; Legal Representation; and Adjudication of Unaccompanied Alien Children in the United States.”

121. Whenever possible, migrant women who are suffering the effects of persecution or abuse, or who are pregnant or nursing infants, should not be detained. If these vulnerable women cannot be released from ICE custody, the Department of Homeland Security should develop alternative programmes such as intense supervision or electronic monitoring, typically via ankle bracelets. These alternatives have proven effective during pilot programmes. They are not only more humane for migrants who are particularly vulnerable in the detention setting or who have family members who require their presence, but they also cost, on average, less than half the price of detention.

Sections of the Bustamante Report archived at the Texas Civil Rights Review

Summary: Banned from Hutto without Satisfactory Explanation.

I.A.: Rights to Fair Deportation Hearings Violated

I.B.: USA ‘Long Way Out of Step’ with Rights to Liberty

II.A. & II.B.: The Spriri of 1996 and Mandatory Deportations

II.C.: Forty Local and State Agencies Recruited for Immigration Enforcement

II.D. & II.E.: A System of Morning Raids and Mandatory Detentions

III.A. & III.B.: Rebuilding New Orleans upon Migrant Labor Abuses

IV. & V.: Punitive, Inconsiderate, and Expensive Policies Should be Reversed

We have also converted the report of UN Special Rapporteur Jorge Bustamante to pdf format. (Get it here: 250kb).

We are awaiting permission to identify the author. –gm

Dear Editor,

I am afraid that, as an historian, I must respectfully disagree with some of your praise for The Great Debaters. Although I congratulate Winfrey and Washington for bringing the story of a authentic hero such as Melvin Tolson to the attention of the general public, I still must object – strongly – to their “improvements.”

There is a universe of difference – mental, moral, spiritual, and ethical – between defeating a USC debate team (my alma mater, incidentally) in Bovard Auditorium and vanquishing Harvard in Sanders Theatre – the same difference that would hold if the Wiley College football team had actually beaten the Crimson in Harvard Stadium while the film showed them beating the Trojans in the Coliseum.

But the real problem is the question of being true to historical fact. I have no doubt that racists will latch on to the rather cheap melodramatic substitution of Harvard for USC in order to attack the veracity of the movie’s portrait of Jim Crow.

A similar case arose with Anne Frank’s diary. Because Anne’s father removed some of her most intimate entries dealing with sexual matters, the Holocaust deniers declared that the entire diary was a fraud, and a team of scholars had to waste everybody’s time and money performing an exhaustive inquest in order to prove the reality of the diary. So it is important to get the facts right.