It is noxious enough for politicians to use women and children who are fleeing to the United States to escape violence, terrorism and extreme poverty to further their electoral agendas – and now their November power grabs. But it’s even more disgusting to build detention facilities and lock people up for corporate profit.
But that’s exactly what the US is doing – even though many of the women and children we’re detaining and deporting are legitimate refugees who have the right to due process.
While unaccompanied immigrant children are under the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services, undocumented children who are apprehended with adults – usually a single mother – fall under the jurisdiction of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They are detained with their guardians in facilities often run by private prison companies whose expertise lies in incarcerating adult criminals, monitored by prison staff untrained in child welfare and ignored by state child-welfare authorities, who don’t license or monitor prisons as care facilities for minors. (And all this despite the fact that illegal immigration is a civil and not a criminal offense.)
This year, amidst a historic influx of undocumented immigrant families, three new family detention facilities were built in a matter of months. Two of them are here in Texas and one, in Dilley, will be the largest in the country – with enough beds to house 2,400 women and their children. According to its website, the facility – owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) – is slated to open for business this November.
Meanwhile, at the new Karnes County Family Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas, opened in August under the management of the GEO Group (the other largest private prison company in the world), numerous female detainees allege they were sexually assaulted or harassed by male prison guards in front of their children.
CCA is not without its own controversy. The T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility – a former family detention facility run by CCA in Taylor, Texas – was forced to stop serving as a family facility in 2009 after lawsuits from advocacy groups detailed a long list of civil rights violations committed by Hutto staff. One that stands out as particularly cruel is the charge that the guards at Hutto frequently threatened their child detainees that they would send their mothers away to another facility if the kids cried too much or made too much noise while playing. In the documentary America’s Family Prison, a young former detainee tells the camera that every night she was in Hutto, she dreamed that her mother or aunt were taken to another facility.
Hutto also:
- failed to provide children with adequate healthcare; required children to wear prison scrubs;
- didn’t allow some children to go outside for a month at a time;
- held families in small cells with an open toilet for 11 to 12 hours a day;
- refused to allow families to keep food, writing implements, or toys in their cells;
- and gave children and families little privacy.
Lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security and ICE argued that practices at Hutto were in violation of the Flores settlement of 1997 that established minimum standards for the housing and release of all minors in federal immigration custody.
Ending the use of Hutto as a family detention facility in 2009 left only one family facility in operation – with less than 100 beds – in Berks County, Pennsylvania. But as the influx of women and children from Central America heated up this summer, President Obama decided to rely once again on family detention facilities as part of his plan to speed hearings and deportations of those seeking refugee status – without risking political fallout from letting families with children utilize alternative programs.
Despite not being called “prisons”, these so-called “family facilities” still lock their inhabitants in a cell every night by 10pm – and immigrant advocates decry their use when more humane solutions exist and are found to cost less and be more effective. Non-profit run shelter programs that give adults some autonomy (like the ability to shop for and cook their own food and take escorted trips into nearby towns) and even electronic monitoring programs have both been successful in maintaining track of people awaiting their immigration trials while affording them the dignity every human being deserves.
Most importantly, these alternative models are in keeping with the Flores agreement that mandates that DHS “actively and continuously” seek to release children in custody unless detainment is necessary to ensure they make it to court or to keep them safe.
According to Flores, those kids who must be detained should be so “in the least restrictive setting appropriate for their ages and special needs”, and the kids should be provided “suitable living conditions, suitable food, appropriate medical, dental, and mental health care, and adequate educational services and discipline which does not have adverse psychological consequences.”
The risks of failing to provide alternate means to detention are well documented: independent study after independent study shows that people, regardless of age, can suffer psychological damage during detention, but children are particularly vulnerable – making the incarceration of families a really bad idea.
And in a study by the Australian Human Right Commission, researchers found that the inability of parents in family detention to adequately care for their children (because of their own deprivation) could lead them to feel increasingly guilty over having brought their child into the situation and increasingly hopeless about their chances of advocating for them in any meaningful way. The result can be parents so despondent that they cannot emotionally respond to their child. Some parents participating in the study became so depressed they had to be hospitalized – resulting in them being separated from their children.
Meanwhile, our elected officials close their eyes and pigheadedly adhere to their political talking points, more concerned with racking up retweets from their ill-informed voter base than they are with the fate of these women and children languishing in their for-profit hell holes. If only Congress could spend a week living in a family detention center. Maybe then they’d end this immigration stalemate, along with America’s shameful episode of locking up families, for which we’ll surely be judged on the wrong side of history.
