Detention center called ‘prison-like’
TAYLOR, Texas – The day Mustafa Elmi turned 3 years old, he had to report to his cell three times for head count. To be able to get one hour of recreation inside a concrete compound sealed off by metal gates and razor wire, he had to pin his picture ID to his uniform.
Such routines characterized Mustafa’s life and that of his mother, Bahjo Hosen, 26, during their first seven months in the United States, the country to which they fled to escape political persecution in their native Somalia. They ended up in the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, one of the nation’s newest detention centers for illegal immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security touts as an “effective and humane alternative” to keep immigrant families together while they await the outcome of immigration court hearings or deportation.
Before the facility opened, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) routinely separated parents from their children upon apprehension by the Border Patrol. Infants and toddlers were placed in federally funded foster homes; adolescents and teenagers were placed in facilities for minors run by the Department of Health and Human Services; and parents were placed in adult detention centers.
Despite the change in policy, two national organizations decry the conditions at Hutto and have termed the facility “a penal detention model that is fundamentally anti-family and anti-American.”
The center, which DHS opened last May, is an unacceptable method “for addressing the reality of the presence of families in our immigration system,” says a report written by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, in New York, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, in Baltimore, and scheduled for release today.
“As a country that supports family values, we should not be treating immigrant families who have not committed a crime like criminals, particularly children,” said Ralston Deffenbaugh, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
The 512-bed Hutto facility is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s push to build detention centers or contract them out to private companies to accommodate illegal immigrants apprehended along the Mexican border. A record 26,500 such immigrants are in detention daily – up from 19,718 a day in 2005.
Hutto, located in central Texas, is used for immigrants from countries other than Mexico who are awaiting “expedited removal from the United States.”
The report lauded the goal of keeping families together but urged DHS to close the Hutto facility, saying that “prison-like institutions” are not appropriate for families. “Family detention is not one that has any precedent in the United States, therefore no appropriate licensing requirements exist,” the report said.
In response, ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi said that the Hutto and Berks facilities “maintain safe, secure and humane conditions and invest heavily in the welfare” of the detainees.
The report recommended that ICE parole asylum-seekers while they await the outcome of their hearings. It also said that immigrant families not eligible for parole should be released to special shelters or other homelike settings run by nonprofit groups and be required to participate in electronic monitoring or an intensive supervision program.