American internment camps are just the beginning
America puts women & children seeking asylum into family immigrant detention centers, by definition they're internment camps!
The South Texas Family Residential Center is just 45 miles away from my childhood prison, and another like it in Karnes City, about 100 miles further away, are new prison camps specifically dedicated to detaining women and children who are trying to escape horrific violence in Central and South America.
"Many of them are escaping from violence and torture, from abuse at the hands of gangs," said Sofia Casini, a detention visitation coordinator at Grassroots Leadership, an organization that helped orchestrate the protest. "To be put inside of centers with armed guards, where the kids are yelled at, it's all a re-traumatization process."
Berenice (not her real name) and her daughter were held in Dilley for three months, and she watched her child’s physical and mental health decline. The child’s skin allergies worsened, she stopped eating and she kept pleading to leave. “She didn’t want to be there. She was always crying,” Berenice recalls.
So the mother went to ICE and requested that she and her daughter be released into the community, where they could wait in relative normality for their asylum petition to be processed. The answer came back clearly. “They told me ‘You can’t come here trying to guilt trip us about your daughter’s illness, she’s not really ill.’ And they said they wouldn’t let us out unless we could pay the bond.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced that the purpose of this facility was to deter families from fleeing to the United States and to send a message that “if you come here, you should not expect to simply be released.”
Irony: DHS announced they've selected the University of Houston as Center of Excellence for Borders, Trade and Immigration Research.
DHS and the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced the selection of the University of Houston as the lead institution for a new DHS Center of Excellence (COE) for Borders, Trade and Immigration Research. S&T will provide the Center for Borders, Trade and Immigration Research with an initial $3.4 million grant for its first operating year.
“We are excited that the University of Houston will join our family of Centers to provide innovative solutions across these extremely important mission areas in the Department,” said S&T’s Office of University Programs (OUP) Director Matthew Clark, Ph.D., which manages the COE system.
Here's two suggestions, stop putting people in interment centers and stop working with colleges to subvert our Bill of Rights! Now where's my $3.4 million?
Satsuki Ina was born behind barbed wire 70 years ago in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp for Japanese-Americans in Northern California. Her parents’ only crime was having the face of the enemy. They were never charged or convicted of a crime; yet they were forced to raise me in a prison camp when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a wartime executive order ultimately authorizing the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent. They were deemed a danger to “national security” and incarcerated without due process of law.
When the war ended, her family was moved to a prison camp in Crystal City, Texas, and finally, after a total of 4 years of captivity, they were released. Decades later, our government acknowledged the injustice that had been committed. She never expected to return to Texas, and she certainly never expected to see other families incarcerated just as her own family had been 73 years ago. But this past year, the U.S. government created something that compelled her to go back.
She visited with mothers and children at the euphemistically named Karnes County “Residential Center” FYI, Family Detention Centers are privately owned by the GEO group which made close to $2 billion last year! GEO shareholders have had a 112 percent return since the last recession began in December 2007. CCA's shareholders saw a return of 85 percent during that same period, said Ryan Meliker.
The 'residential center' reminded her of growing up a prisoner in America:
"We too lived in a constant state of fear and anxiety, never knowing what our fate would be. We too were forced to share our living space with strangers, line up for meals, share public latrines, respond to roll call, and adjust to ever-changing rules and regulations with the eyes of the guards constantly trained on us'.
"The visiting room was a large, sterile space with tables and chairs. In one corner was a shelf and carpet with a few toys. The children are allowed to play with the toys in the corner, but they were not permitted to bring the toys to the table where I sat with the moms. Few children chose to leave their mother’s side. The guard monitored the families as they entered the visiting room. Stern and ill-humored, she served as a strict timekeeper over the precious 60-minute visit the family was allowed Ina said."
DHS/ICE authorities introduced a “no bond, no release” approach in which mothers and young children could be held in custody with no way of getting out for several months. In other cases bonds would be set, sometimes initially by ICE, sometimes on appeal to immigration courts, that would often be prohibitively high, running up to $10,000 or more – a price that many immigrant families could not afford.
In one woman's case, a bond of $5,000 was set by an immigration judge. Having spent all her money on the journey and bribes in Mexico, she had nothing left – “ni un peso”, she said – so $5,000 might as well have been $5m to her. Yet when she went to ICE to ask the agency to waive the bond and let her out, it decided to keep the amount at $5,000, which to her felt like an indefinite prison sentence.
In a statement to the Guardian, ICE said it was using “appropriate prosecutorial discretion and dedicating resources, to the greatest degree possible, to the removal of aliens considered priorities. ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis considering all the merits and factors of each case while adhering to current agency priorities, guidelines and legal mandates.”
So far only eleven members of Congress have called for an end to immigrant family detention!
For-Profit Family Detention: Meet the Private Prison Corporations Making Millions by Locking Up Refugee Families