Dear
Mr. Prime minister haper I don’t like to stay in this jail. I’m only
nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I’m sleeping
beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminister haper give visa for my family.
This place is not good for me. I want to get out of the cell. Just
pleace give visa for my family. My home land is in Canada, My life is
over there. I’m also sleeping beside wasroom. Mr. Priminister haper
pleace bring me and my family to Canada. Thank you so much.
Improvements have been made to the Hutto detention center in efforts to make it humane. However, I still maintain that detaining migrant children and their families for extended periods of time, people who have otherwise committed no crime, will never be humane no matter what the conditions inside the prison are. The ACLU agrees:
Despite the tremendous improvements at Hutto, the facility retains its
essential character: it was a medium security prison managed by the
Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit adult corrections
company. The ACLU remains adamant that detaining immigrant children at
Hutto is inappropriate and calls on Congress to compel DHS to find
humane alternatives for managing families whose immigration status is
in limbo.
The reason I decided to write a post today is because the T. Don Hutto blog is advertising a Toy Drive for the kids in the Hutto Detention Center. I thought it would be a good thing to plant in people’s minds as we all do our christmas shopping. Don’t forget the kids in the Hutto detention center and the millions of migrants everywhere that don’t have a full place in this world.
If you had not posted this, I would not have known. Do you have a link to any of the following:
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p>1. How many tax dollars, per year, Hutto receives for operating this prison for economic migrants and their children?
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p>2. How many tax dollars per year it costs to lock up each family member in this facility?
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p>3. How long, on average, families with children are locked up at Hutto?
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p>Personally, I am a grandaughter of economic migrants from when the world was a simpler, more humane place and tax dollars were not squandered in this fashion.
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p>The current system breeds exploitation, and destroys security – because the more migrants need to hide, the less able they are to report crimes, resist exploitation, and be monitored! If we knew the cost per migrant at Hutto, then that would be a benchmark for me [and others] to come up with “real costs” and design other programs.
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p>For example, if it is costing me, as a taxpayer $22,500.00 per year [a conservative estimate] in tax dollars to lock up each member of a family including that 9-year-old, and instead, migrants could be charged $50,000 in mortgage-like payments and tracked and “on the radar” while they pay in, that would be +$130,000 to the general fund…and it would be paid…
I was looking for the above information but I couldn’t find it. You might want to try emailing the people from that blog I cited above, though. I’m glad that people are making connections between the way migrants are treated and the way others are treated, though.
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p>Many thanks.
Meanness and power plays, by the way, are expensive. Jook at Irag.
The “Don Hutto Family Residential Facility”, was the first prison designed specifically for immigrant families. It is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the U.S.’s largest for-profit corrections company.
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p>…but, unfortunately, it is merely another manifestation of the privatization of the country’s law enforcement operations. I first read about this kind of thing about a decade ago. First, you had Eisenhower’s military-industrial-congressional complex. Now you have the prison-industrial-governmental complex, which is not uncommon in the American South, by the way.
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p>I’ll wager a prediction. Within a few years, large swaths of the USofA will be hiring companies like Blackwater and CACI to provide “police” services. Watch Robert Greenwald’s The Selling of Iraq if you are unfamiliar with those companies.
I didn’t want to read this on a lovely Sunday morning before Christmas. Now I have to figure out how to contribute some engergy to stop it. Proud to be a card carrying mnember of the ACLU.
…and our child welfare establishment is all too often, little better.
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p>”A voice from the trenches”
Their plight SHOCKS the CONTEMPORARY CONSCIENCE of a FEDERAL judge. Even when their families are ripped apart. See my post about the Aguilar case.
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p>If the US Government is “merely” callous and ham-handed, there is no protection.