Hutto immigrant detention center forced to improve conditions
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
By: Enrique Vasquez
Still a concentration camp for the undocumented
A federal judge recently approved an agreement between the U.S. federal government and lawyers for immigrant children. The agreement calls for changes on improving living conditions at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center located in Taylor, Tex.
The detention facility holds non-Mexican undocumented workers and children on noncriminal charges. It is operated
by Corrections Corporation of America, a private capitalist entity.
The ACLU and the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School sued federal officials on behalf of 26 immigrant children and teenagers.
The agreement, which was announced as a trial was set to begin, requires improving education, recreation and nutrition for children, hiring a full-time pediatrician and installing privacy curtains around toilets. It also calls for routine inspections of the detention facility.
"This is a huge victory," said Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU.
"Though we continue to believe that Hutto is an inappropriate place to house children, conditions have drastically improved in areas like education, recreation, medical care and privacy" (New York Times, Aug. 27).
Detainees at the Taylor facility, including children, are forced to wear jail uniforms at all times. Reports showed that families detained at the facility receive substandard medical care and are becoming sick from the food being served to them.
Children only receive one hour of instruction and only 30 minutes of recreational play each day.
All 26 youth involved in the case have been released in the last several months. One of the children, Andrea Restrepo, a 12-year-old from Colombia, was quoted in the ACLU statement, "I am trying to forget everything about Hutto. I feel free. It was a nightmare."
Progressives and revolutionaries must continue demanding full rights for all immigrants and an end to the heightened racist raids that separate families who are imprisoned in "residential centers."
The "catch and remove" policy has incarcerated and deported tens of thousands of undocumented workers and their families. The U.S. government has stepped-up attacks against undocumented workers with racist legislation, raids and immigration policies.
These modern-day concentration camps like Hutto show how the U.S. capitalist government represses a large sector of the working-class in the name of profit and "law and order."
Click here to read more from PSL about Hutto.
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