Immigration Detention

GEO Group Reports on Expanding Capacity in Texas

Nicole — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:51:44 -0700

The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) held a conference call for investors earlier this month. During the call, GEO reported on policy developments that will impact private prison capacity in Texas and beyond. GEO officials stated that the company's private prison capacity is scheduled to increased by 5,900 beds during 2008, representing a 12% year-to-year increase in bed space. During 2007, the prison profiteer had a capacity of 48,260 and grew to 54,160 beds in 2008.

Several private prison units owned or managed by GEO opened for business in recent weeks, with more prison beds on the way. According George Zoley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GEO, continued demand from federal clients are driving private prison expansion in Texas and other states. Zoley stated that client demand among the agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), United States Marshals Service (USMS), and the Bureau of Prissons (BOP) will lead GEO to open three new major facilities in Texas for an increase of 3,200 beds in the lone star state.

According to Zoley, the desire of federal clients to consolidate prison populations into the same facilities drove the company to construct new prisons that could accommodate customer needs. As a result GEO is bringing online the three new facilities in Texas.

During the call, Zoley mentioned that this would free up approximately 1,000 beds in Texas as the private prison company shifts federal prisoners and detainees to the new facilities it is bring online. Apparently, ICE, USMS, and BOP are coordinating their prison populations so that some of their prisoners can be held in the same facilities.

Investors questioned GEO's decision to construct new private prisons that would result in 1,000 empty beds in Texas. Zoley assured his investors that despite temporary population reductions at certain facilities, new inflows of detainees as a result of current policy will result in normalizing occupancy levels at older prisons once the new private prisons are at capacity.

It is incredibly troubling listening to the exchange between Zoley and GEO investors regarding the profitability of the company's given the empty 1,000 beds that result from new construction and the consolidation of federal prison populations. After all, each bed does represent a human being for a period of time, many of whom have families and ties to their communities. We encourage everyone to listen to the GEO conference call, it is incredible how criminal justice policy can be reduced to dollars and cents for prison privateers.

More Private Prison Tents in West Texas?

Bob — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:46:35 -0700

Are tents catching on as the latest fad in private prison construction in Texas?

It's bTent Cityeen widely reported that Management and Training Corporation's Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville is home to 2,000 detainees contracted from Immigration and Customs Enforcement living in windowless Kevlar tent-like structures. The facility has become known as "Tent City." Another 1,000 detainees reside at the WDC in brick-and-mortar buildings the company calls "firm structures." The facility's tents had to be evacuated in the run-up to Hurricane Dolly last month.

Now Sierra Blancacomes word out of west Texas that Emerald Corrections is constructing a tent-like addition to its Hudspeth County Regional Correctional Center in Sierra Blanca. The Hudspeth facility was built as a U.S. Marshal's facility, and drew controversy over its financing mechanism, and is most likely housing immigrants being criminally prosecuted for immigration-related crimes.

I first heard that the facility was expanding from Sierra Blanca environmental and social justice actiSierra Blancavist Bill Addington, and it's now confirmed in pictures from Border Ambassador and frequent private prison protestor Jay Johnson-Castro. These structures look fairly similar to the Raymondville facility, though I've heard they may be constructed out of a foam-like structure. The facility may have to worry about failing federal reviews, as many federally-contracted private prisons have in the past several years, as reported by the Texas Observer.

It's certainly a disturbing trend in private prison development. We'll keep you posted.

Questions Remain About Conditions for Texas Detainees Evacuated After Hurricane Dolly

Bob — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:37:37 -0700

We reported two weeks ago that major questions existed about conditions for immigrant detainees held in south Texas detention centers after Hurricane Dolly caused damage to the region. It appears that many of our fears may have been well founded.

While the roofs of Management and Training Corporation's "Tent City" detention center did not blow off, approximately 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees were evacuated from south Texas in the run-up to Hurricane Dolly - approximately 1,200 from the Port Isabel Detention Center and 2,000 from the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville. About 1,000 detainees at Willacy who are held in "firm structures" were not evacuated. The detainees were evacuated all over the country, many to the Otero detention center in New Mexico, but also to Houston, Laredo, Huntsville, Florence, AZ, Miami, and Orlando.

We've heard reports that detainees shipped to Otero have been sleeping on the floor there, the roof is leaking, the facility has run out of food at times and that not enough food is being served to detainees, phone cards are not provided for calls, that pens and paper must be purchased from commissary, and that access to the library is denied. There are also significant concerns about access to legal representation as many detainees have been separated from their lawyers during key times in their case, and detainees are being denied confidential phone calls to attorneys.

We'll keep you updated on reports on the aftermath of Hurricane Dolly and the evacuated detainees.

New Hutto Contracts Block Detainee 9-1-1 Calls

Bob — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:13:10 -0700

Via the T. Don Hutto blog and from an excellent report by Taylor Daily Press ("ICE Blocks 9-1-1 Calls from T. Don Hutto," ) reporter Philip Jankowski, a new contract signed by Williamson County would ban detainees at Corrections Corporation of America's T. Don Hutto family detention center from making 911 emergency calls. According to the story,

Outgoing 9-1-1 calls placed by immigrants detained at T. Don Hutto Residential Facility in Taylor will soon be blocked after Immigration Customs Enforcement changes the phone system in the former prison.

The block affects telephones used specifically by immigrants housed in the facility. Also blocked will be all incoming phone calls.

The change came as part of a change in the contract between Williamson County and Immigration Customs Enforcement billed as "Modification ... relating to Low Cost Telephone Services" on the county commissioners' agenda Tuesday.

The commissioners voted 5-0 in favor of the item with no discussion of the matter. After the vote, County Judge Dan Gattis said he was unaware the alteration in the agreement effectively blocked outgoing 9-1-1 phone calls.

Of course, this new agreement is especially controversial given the sexual assault scandal at the facility in 2007. The issue is raised in the issue in the article by LULAC activist Jose Orta.

Local League of United Latin American Citizens member and T. Don Hutto critic Jose Orta said ICE and Corrections Corporation of America, which operates the facility, were "covering themselves" from any possible calls to police.

He referenced an alleged sexual assault that occurred in the facility in May of 2007. That incident led to the firing of a CCA employee after he was caught on a surveillance camera sneaking in and out of a detainee's cell.

No charges were ever filed against the employee in that instance because of a now-corrected loophole in federal law.

Check out the debate over in the comments section of T. Don Hutto for more analysis on the need for 911 phone access at T. Don Hutto.

Immigrant Detention Concerns as Hurricane Dolly Arrives in South Texas

Bob — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:33:56 -0700

As Hurricane Dolly pounds parts of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas today, major concerns exist about the potential evacuation of the thousands of immigrant detainees and prisoners being held in the area. Up to 4,200 detainees are held in several detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service in the Valley, including up to 1,200 ICE detainees at the Port Isabel Detention Center, a capacity of 3,000 at the MTC's Willacy County Proccessing Center in Raymondville, as well as more than 500 U.S. Marshals detainees at the Willacy County Regional Detention Center and state and county prisoners held at other prison facilities in the area. Significant concerns about the evacuation and treatment of these detainees exist including:

1) ICE has announced the evacuation of the PIDC detainees but has not announced whether the Raymondville detainees are being evacuated. This is of special concern because 2,000 of the Raymondville detainees reside pods made of window-less Kevlar tents, which are unproved in Hurricane-like weather conditions.

2) We've heard that female detainees from Port Isabel are being transfered to Laredo, and that male detainees are being transferred to facilities around the country. Have their family members and lawyers been contacted in advance about the transfer of their clients to other facilities?

3) A large number of detainees with mental illnesses are held at the PIDC. In light of recent reports of some immigrant detainees being drugged in transit and a general lack of mental health and medical care at many ICE detention facilities across the country, it's important to ask if these detainees receiving mental health treatment during their evacuation and if they are being drugged during their transit.

We'll keep you posted on developments from Hurricane Dolly. If you have any news and/or information regarding the evacuation, lack of evacuation, lack of medical care or other issues with evacuation, please let us know.

LULAC Passes National Resolution Against Hutto

Bob — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:53:41 -0700

The League of United Latin American Citizens has passed a resolution opposing the T. Don Hutto detention center and the policy of family detention. Members of local LULAC chapters as well as the organization's national leadership have been involved in the Hutto vigils for more than a year. Read the text of the resolution signed by national President Rosa Rosales,

WHEREAS, LULAC promotes and defends universal standards of human rights including the rights and humane treatment of undocumented children and their mothers, and

WHEREAS, the lengthy detention of undocumented children, pregnant women and nursing mothers at a private facility called the T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Tayler, Texas has reportedly traumatized numerous undocumented children and their parents, and

WHEREAS, this private prison facility called T. Don Hutto Detention Center is reportedly serving as the model for the further expansion for the incarceration of thousands of undocumented families throughout the United States, and

WHEREAS, 200 to 300 families a day are currently being detained for periods of 12 months or longer at T. Don Hutto Detention Center and

WHEREAS, the corporate owner of the T. Don Hutto Detention Center which was formerly a medium security prison, charges the United States Government $200 per day per person detained and

WHEREAS, there are less restrictive alternatives for monitoring the whereabouts of undocumented children and their parents while they await pending immigration hearings

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT LULAC Councils, District, State and National Administration will do everything in their power to close the T.Don Hutto Detention Center immediately and

NOW, THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that LULAC Councils, District State and National Administrations support petition drives, peaceful public demonstrations, town hall meetings that call for the immediate closure of the T. Don Hutto Detention Facility; AND petition members of the United States Congress to review and reform immigration laws and regulations to include for a path to citizenship and cease the incarceration of innocent children and parents.

Approved this 11th day of July 2008.

Rosa Rosales
LULAC National President

Proposed Raymondville Family Detention Center Being Pushed by Prison Developer

Bob — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:07:54 -0700

While we've reported that one of the three new family detention centers proposed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may end up in Raymondville, I hadn't seen this Valley Morning Story until recently. The story provides more details on the proposed Raymondville lock-up,

City officials are considering a proposal to build a 200-bed, $30 million detention center to hold illegal immigrant families.

Raymondville city commissioners sent a letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to support a plan to build the detention center, City Manager Eleazar Garcia said Wednesday. "We haven't committed ourselves to anything yet, except we're interested and would like to know more about it," Garcia said.

Since the mid-1990s, Willacy County has built prisons and a detention center in the Raymondville industrial park. Already there are a 1,000-bed state prison, a 500-bed county prison, a 96-bed county jail and a 3,000-bed illegal immigrant detention center, the largest in the United States.

We've reported in the past on Raymondville's growing dependence on immigrant detention beds to survive economically. We've also reported that prisons do not create long-term economic growth, and that prison towns tend to scare away more beneficial industries. Of course, there are those that stand to benefit from a new detention center in Raymondville - prison developers and private prison operaters.

According to the article, one of those is Michael Harling of Municipal Capital Markets Group.

Michael Harling of Municipal Capital Markets Group in Dallas, which would work to finance the project, said it would create 200 jobs. Harling called the city to ask if officials would consider the project, Garcia said.

"They asked if the city would be supportive of putting it in the industrial park," Garcia said. The city would sell bonds to fund construction of the project, Harling said.

Federal revenue derived from holding illegal immigrants would pay off the bonds, Harling said. Garcia said the detention center would allow illegal immigrant parents to be housed with their children.

"It's not a detention center," Harling said. "It's a facility for holding families, for holding people who have not committed crimes."

I certainly find it interesting and more than a little disturbing that a prison financier - someone who makes their money off the floating of bonds to build prisons - is the one who is acting as the spokesperson for the policy of detaining children and their families.

We'll keep you updated on developments on ICE's three new proposed family detention centers. read more »

Nashville Scene Exposes CCA, ICE on Hutto

Bob — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:59:20 -0700

The Nashville Scene, Corrections Corporation of America's hometown alternative weekly, has published a blistering expose ("Locked and Loaded," June 19th) on the company, with particular attention paid to CCA's T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, Texas. The story draws heavily on court documents from the lawsuit against the facility, including this heart-breaking testimony:

After she arrived in Taylor, Elsa and her family shared a tiny living area, where they’d be loudly awoken at 5:45 a.m. Elsa, Richard and Angelina then had 20 minutes to eat breakfast. When they didn’t ﬁnish on time, guards would just snatch their food and throw it in the trash. “When this happens, the children cry and cry,” Elsa later explained in an afﬁdavit that chronicled her plight.

The detention center was very cold, so much so that the guards walked around wearing gloves. But they’d yell at Elsa if she asked for a blanket. One time they came into her cell and conﬁscated two of her sweaters.

“They don’t care that we are cold,” she said. “They don’t care if we eat or if we don’t eat.”

Elsa and her children wore prison uniforms and spent hours in their pod, often with no toys or books for the kids. One day, Elsa and her family were in the doctor’s ofﬁce, where all the kids were playing with crayons. Angelina drew a picture, but a guard grabbed the girl’s artwork. She cried a lot at Hutto, wondering what her family had done wrong.

“Mommy, where is God that he doesn’t want to help us? Mommy, tell God to come and take us out of here and take us to our house,” Elsa recalled her daughter saying. “Mommy, why do they have us as prisoners if we have never killed anybody?”

Unfortunately, such stories of horrid conditions at Hutto were almost common-place before the settlement between the ACLU and UT Immigration Law Clinic and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Amongst the more interesting elements of the article are the revelation that internal ICE memos were highly critical of conditions at Hutto. According to the story,

Just about everyone else who walked through the gates at Hutto, including federal authorities, saw it as a deeply troubling facility. In March 2007, ICE inspectors visited Hutto and, in their own distinct bureaucratic language, corroborated the anguished accounts of the detainees. The inspectors noted that their “overall review of the facility can be accurately rated as deﬁcient” and determined that the staff wasn’t following basic standards of detention.

“The Review Team’s observation of CCA’s overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency in their work performance,” the agency noted in its report.

A month later, an interofﬁce memo from ICE said that at Hutto, CCA is “losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” That’s because the company was only paying its detention ofﬁcers around $10 an hour, nearly $4 less than what they could make at the county jail.

“As long as CCA continues to hire employees at this rate per hour, they will continue to experience the problems they are currently experiencing on the ﬂoor,” read the memo. “The current problems CCA is experiencing are a direct result of what ‘they are paying their employees for.’ Unfortunately, it is at ICE’s expense.”

We'll keep you posted on further developments on Hutto. For more information, see our previous coverage or check out tdonhutto.blogspot.com.

Abuse Allegations Could Cost Cornell Youth Detention Contract

Bob — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:24:03 -0700

Houston-based Cornell Companies appears to be losing its contract to detain immigrant youth at its Hector Garza center according to an excellent article by Hernan Rozemberg in Sunday's San Antonio Express-News ("Youth Center Director Cites Suit in Feds' Decision," June 15). The facility holds unaccompanied minors apprehended in the United States for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of Health and Human Services.

The center has seen its supply of detainees shrink since a lawsuit was filed against the company, its warden, and employees alleging neglect and abuse. According to the Express-News story:

Unlike other HHS-contracted “shelters” or dormitory-style campuses, the Hector Garza center is designated “staff secure” because it's a more restrictive setting meant to handle problematic youngsters.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Antonio in April, came as a result of a brawl between center residents and staff in February. Staffers called police to help quell the mayhem, which concluded with four minors under arrest.

According to the suit, filed by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, excessive violence used by staff and police symbolized incessant abuse that minors reported to supervisors to no avail. State and federal officials are accused of covering up abuse reports.

Incredibly, the warden of the facility seems to be blaming the lawyers in the case for the allegations of abuse:

Fernández said overzealous lawyers preyed on minors' survival instincts, prompting them to sue the center. Staff and residents had cordial and even amiable relations before lawyers began showing up, he lamented.

We'll keep you updated on developments from Garza and other Cornell units around Texas. Our previous coverage on the subject: Eight Unaccompanied Minors Sue Cornell Over Physical Abuse. read more »

State Democratic Resolutions Committee Passes Hutto Resolution

nick — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:54:55 -0700

Earlier this month, a combined version of resolutions calling for alternatives to family detention passed through the Resolutions Committee at this year's Democratic State Convention.

As Bob wrote in April, we knew that versions of the resolution had passed through Senate District Precincts in Travis County (Senate Districts 14 and 25) and Williamson and Brewster Counties. The next step was the State Convention.

A Temporary Resolutions Committee met two weeks before the convention to organize and categorize 2,000 resolutions, and on Friday, June 6th, each of Texas' 31 Senate Districts elected a member to a Permanent Resolutions committee to consider Resolutions on the following morning. The Permanent Resolutions Committee met on Saturday, June 7 from 8:00 am to almost 6:00 pm, and during that time it approved only about 100 resolutions. The Hutto Resolution was one of those, and after passing through the committee, it was referred to the elected State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) for further consideration.

The resolution language that passed through the Resolutions committee was briefer and slightly weaker than that approved at the Travis County Senate District Conventions, which I attended. The whereas sections were significantly cut, and the resolution does not require copies of the resolution to be sent to Michael Chertoff, President Bush, Congressional leaders, and members of the Texas delegation to Congress. Overall, though, the language approved by the Resolutions committee is a major step in the right direction.

The fate of the Hutto resolution is now in the hands of the SDEC. If approved, the Texas Democratic Party will add to its platform that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should consider all alternatives to the detention of immigrant and asylum-seeking families with children, and the resolution will go to the Democratic National Convention in August.

It is nice to see a major political party take a position on family detention, especially as we've learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has accepted bids for three more Hutto-like family detention centers.

The resolution language that passed ut of the Resolutions committee is below:

RESOLUTION FOR ALTERNATIVES TO DETENTION OF IMMIGRANT AND ASYLUM-SEEKING CHILDREN
WHEREAS border protection is important to the security of the nation as a whole;
WHEREAS immigration affects the economic and social well-being of both the United States and Mexico;
WHEREAS a private firm re-opened the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas, for the purpose of detaining immigrant and asylum-seeking families who are awaiting immigration proceedings,
WHEREAS it is not appropriate to convert a medium-security prison and rename it as a family detention center where children are detained with their families and some children are separated from their families;
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Texas Democratic Party add to its platform that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should consider all alternatives to the detention of immigrant and asylum-seeking families with children, and must reunite children with their families; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a child who is brought into this country by a family member shall not be subject to criminal sanctions, and the child's presence in the U.S. shall not be defined as unlawful.

We'll keep you updated on the resolution's progress.