Posted on 04/09/2007 7:30:00 AM PDT by P-40
A mundane, state-of-the-art building outside of Austin has stirred the hearts of two radio-television-film students, numerous immigrant rights groups on campus, the UT Immigration Law Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The facility under scrutiny is the privately owned T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a for-profit immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas.
Inside, approximately 200 immigrant children and their families live in what some people are calling inhumane conditions while awaiting their court hearings.
Nine-year-old Canadian Kevin Yourdkhani wrote a message to his prime minister pleading for rescue.
"I don't like to stay in this jail. I'm only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I'm sleeping beside the wall. Please Prime Minister Harper give visa for my family," he said in his letter.
Fifteen-year-old Lithuanian Egle "Anna" Baubonyte expressed how she felt about the center in her plaintiff statement for a recently filed law suit.
"In my opinion, even if they are trying to make this place nicer and look like an actual residential center, it is still a prison to me. There's no pediatrician. Nurses don't care if babies are sick or not. They treat us like we're nothing," she said.
On March 6, the national ACLU joined with ACLU of Texas and the UT Immigration Law Clinic to file 10 lawsuits in federal court disputing the federal government's detainment of immigrant children in the residential center. Lead counsel Vanita Gupta said her first visit to Hutto left her with a serious sense of urgency to do something.
"My first trip to Hutto was in early February. I have visited many Texas prisons before, and I was shocked to find that Hutto was no different than those and that such young children were being confined in a prison," Gupta said. "I spent several days in the facility, speaking to detainees and their children and investigating the conditions."
UT student groups respond
Passersby in the rainy West Mall over the last week-and-a-half may have stumbled upon giant message boards showcasing documentation of Yourdkhani, Baubonyte and other children's pleas to be freed from the detention center. The display was organized by numerous student groups, including Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlán the Campus Anti-War Movement to End the Occupation and the Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color. The political organization aims to "promote the theory and practice of equality and social justice," among other goals, according to the Office of the Dean of Students. The children's hand-written pleas and formal plaintiff statements were taken off of the ACLU Web site.
Continued...
Well they are in Texas. Probably crossed that famous US-Canadian border in Texas.
I don’t know. The Canucks are pretty loose on their own immigration standards and will even let in somebody with a “Death to America Jihad” t-shirt. Whether they can easily get Canadian citizenship or not or whether the people in question have citizenship or not, I don’t know, but note the last name. Even so, my BS meter is twitching too.
I wish you could see me because right now is exactly what I look like when I couldn’t care less about something.
Send her to Canada! Do we have to kiss everybody's #ss that gets a chafe under their waist band.
L
Then why the hell are you in Texas??
The author of the piece brings up the Canadian angle...and then just drops it. I notice a comment posted at the end of the article that addresses this...but no one has responded to it.
This article has mine pegged at 0.
>:P
Whoever thought up this name has way too much time on their hands and is NOT a friend of the US.
Check the names in this case: "Canadian" Kevin Yourdkhani and his parents, Majid Yourdkhani and Masomeh Alibegi, probably aren't fans of hockey or Moosehead.
*****Campus Anti-War Movement to End the Occupation****
I think they are talking about the United States occupying Mexican land which we call Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, etc.
As for the Canadians - they are talking about the entire tier of northing states plus Alaska.
We’ve been doing this occupying business for a long time, even before England, France, Spain, Russia and Portugal. It really is time we gave it all back. So they could occupy it.
Why is the prison getting the blame? The blame should be placed upon the parents who lead their children into this prison. The parents should be charged with child endangerment, at the least.
Another guarantee that they’re commies is any mention of “social justice”, which is their code for socialism.
******It really is time we gave it all back
I hope you meant this as a sarcasm*****
To think it other than sarcasm is to never have read any of my other posts on this board.
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