The week before last Margaret Talbot had an article in The New Yorker on the T. Don Hutto Residential Center near Austin, Texas. Hutto is a detention center for illegal immigrants and their families, though not Mexican nationals who are immediately returned to Mexico when apprehended. The immigrants at Hutto (there is another center like it in Pennsylvania) are held awaiting action on their case. So are their children.
I’ve been trying to read this article for several days. I get through about three or four paragraphs and I throw the magazine down in disgust. The story it tells about us and our country is just too depressing.
Read along with me a little:
Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.
Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”
The adults incarcerated committed no serious crime. The children, of course, committed no crime at all. And this is how we treat them. Sometimes I am just so embarrassed to be an American.
You really should read this article.