Christmas in the Concentration Camp
Tip o’ the tam to Ryan at Lutton Square, via Fire Dog Lake and Latina Lista
One of the more disturbing stories that surfaced after the Swift meat plant raids was how too many children were left without a parent and/or farmed out to friends and families with no immediate word on how they will be reconnected with their mami and papi.
But if news filtering out of one of the newly designated immigrant detention centers for families is any indication, no undocumented parent is going to open their mouth and claim their children if the whole family is going to be subjected to what is becoming known as the first known concentration camp on American soil in the 21st Century.
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas (on the outskirts of Austin, Texas) is a private detention facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America. It and a smaller center in Pennsylvania are the only two facilities in the country that are authorized to hold non-Mexican immigrant families and children on noncriminal charges.
What does this mean?
It means that at the Taylor facility of the 400 people “held” there, 200 are children. And all are families that can be held there for whatever length of time without due process conducted in a timely manner.
To top it off, as long as the men, women and children are held there, the facility’s operator draws a daily profit – per person.
The children range in age from infants on up.
[snip]
Jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with jail uniforms; children are issued uniforms as soon as they can fit into them — and everyone must wear name tags, even the babies.
Lawyers are reporting that the families are receiving substandard medical care and becoming ill from the food being served them. Children are losing weight and people are complaining of migraine-type headaches.
Those clients who are asylum seekers, say the lawyers, are continually suffering trauma on top of the trauma they’ve already undergone in their home countries – all without receiving any kind of psychological treatment.
Originally, the detention facilities were touted by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as a way to keep families together while waiting for their cases to come up for court review.
Well, they are accomplishing that goal – to the exclusion of being allowed any outside contact with the rest of the world, aside from those who have lawyers.
The plight of these families caught in a government-sanctioned Hell is slowly spreading (Texas Civil Rights Review, Austin’s American Statesman Editorial,American Statesman article) but with Christmas less than a week away these families truly need a miracle to let them know that the outside world knows that they are there — not to mention, the children who need to know that Santa or Los Tres Reyes, or the other Holiday entities observed by those who are not Mexican or Latin American, will know where to find them.
This is morally wrong. As I wrote to Ryan when he alerted me to this,
You’d hope that for one stinkin’ week, the party of
family values and Jesus Christ would declare a ceasefire in their war on families and their denigration of the name “Jesus Christ”, just one stinkin’ week of acting like human fucking beings instead of unrepentant assholes. And your hope would be dashed.
Oh sure, some troll asshole is gonna show up here blubbering “But-but-but they were here illegally!” Yeah, well they were hired illegally too, and no one’s doing one goddamned thing to bring the massive corporations that benefit from cheap illegal labor to heel, are they? This is a sane immigration policy?
No: all this does is give a pass to the deep-pocketed corporations that enjoy the status quo, while tearing families apart and making poverty a crime.
So don’t talk to me about law enforcement or stemming illegal immigration. It’s a dishonest charade. If you won’t get serious about dealing with enforcement on employers, and creating a system they can rely upon and be held accountable to, it’s all bullshit. It’s all the exploitation of brown people, the criminalization of children and families, the placing of children in prison uniforms on American soil just before Christmas: American concentration camps.
You can do something: your congressional representative is on break, and not expecting calls about this. Call their local offices (use the links to the Senate and the House in my sidebar: their urls make it easy to find your senator or representative, and they all have their local contact information displayed, usually under “contact”).
And if you’re wondering why someone like me, a native-born American, a white guy, someone with a reasonably well-paying job, is so angry about this, I’ll give you several reasons.
#1: I spent 18 years of my working life in kitchens, working side by side with Latinos from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Some of these guys worked at two different restaurants, going from the AM shift to the night shift with no break in between. They never had “weekends”. they just worked all the time, living in conditions none of us would ever willingly accept,in order to support their families. I see no difference between brown people black people or white people: this is exploitation, plain and simple.
#2: At my current job, we deal extensively with domestic violence victims. If you don’t live in Philadelphia, you may not know that we have a large and growing Mexican and Latin American population. Many battered women won’t report the violence they’re suffering because they’re afraid they’ll be deported, regardless of legislation protecting them (VAWA), so they get trapped in dangerous, sometimes lethal, situations.
#3: It punishes the weak and poor in services of the wealthy and powerful. And you know that gets my goat worse than just about anything.
Please call or write your representatives and senators: this is unfair, unjust, un-American, and deeply, morally wrong.
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:50 am
[...] Tip o’ the tam to Ryan at Lutton Square, via Fire Dog Lake and Latina Lista, cross-posted at Brendan Calling. I’m sure many of you are more than aware of the recent DHS/ICE raids at Swift Meatpacking Plants, which hauled awqay some 1270 or so immigrants for identity theft violations (of which so far only 65 were actually guilty) . This is an update on what’s going on in Texas. One of the more disturbing stories that surfaced after the Swift meat plant raids was how too many children were left without a parent and/or farmed out to friends and families with no immediate word on how they will be reconnected with their mami and papi. [...]
December 24th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
It’s a dishonest charade. If you won’t get serious about dealing with enforcement on employers, and creating a system they can rely upon and be held accountable to, it’s all bullshit.
Believe me, convervatives are pretty pissed about Bush’s position on immigration. They want the current laws that were duly enacted by Congress to be enforced and that means cracking down on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Realconservatives would like to see them punished and the job magnet turned off.