This was my second time traveling out to Hutto. Transcript and more information below.

[Chanting]

“I’ve known about this place, this is just my first time coming here. When I first got here, I actually felt like crying because I felt so angry that they would do this to people. Everybody talks about peace in the world and stuff, but this has nothing to do with it…”

18-year-old Yvette Garza joined about a hundred people from around Texas on Saturday afternoon in Taylor, a forty-minute drive from Austin. For the third year in a row, activists marked World Refugee Day with a march across town to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, an immigrant detention center holding undocumented families, including at least 100 women and young children. Jose Orta, a Taylor resident, said the corporate-run facility should be shut down.

“They are incarcerated. And those children have done nothing, nothing wrong. They are non-criminals. Yet they are in a medium-security prison. No matter what you call it – you can call it a detention facility or a residential facility, whatever. It is a medium-security prison, and T. Don Hutto’s got to go!”

[Marching]

“People started making profits for people wanting to make money off of people’s misery.”

Conrado Acevedo, an activist with the indigenous coalition ‘Defense of Our Mother,’ traveled from Houston.

“They used to let ‘em go and then they would show up in court, which was the more humane way. But now when you put people in jail, especially a mother with kids, I mean that’s totally uncomprehensible in a supposedly democratic society. So we’ve been coming here for two years…”

[Sound]

The march eventually spilled onto an field alongside the facility. Marchers raised their voices, hoping the kids inside would hear them.

The group rallied for another few hours with music and speeches in the blazing sun across from the detention center. They vowed to continue protesting until the facility is closed and the families are released.

It’s June 22, 2009, this has been a Mediahacker.org podcast, and I’m Ansel Herz.

Cross-posted to Youtube and to HIMC. Learn more:

• T. Don Hutto blog
• America’s Family prison short film by Matt Gossage
• “The Least of These” film
• More pictures at Houston Indymedia

Update: The Southwest Workers Union is calling for a phone blast directed at Amnesty International and the Haitian Consulate in Haiti to stop Rama Carty’s deportation (info). Also, here (MP3) are excerpts of my interview with Sarnata Reynolds, Refugee Program Director at Amnesty.

From my story in today’s Free Speech Radio News headlines (listen here):

An update to a story FSRN has been following about a hunger strike at a Texas Immigration detention center… Human rights groups say they are concerned about an immigrant detainee who was suddenly moved to Louisiana for deportation yesterday. His tranfer comes after he spoke with representatives of Amnesty International at the Texas detention center where he was leading the hunger strike. FSRN’s Ansel Herz reports.

39-year-old Rama Carty has lived in the United States since he was 15-months-old. He was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has never been to Haiti, where his parents are from, but he is scheduled to be deported there in about one week. For the past month Carty has helped lead a hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas. After speaking with Amnesty International staff earlier this week, Carty was woken up Wednesday by prison guards and informed he was going to be transferred. Sarnata Reynolds, the Refugee Program Director at Amnesty International USA, describes what followed.

“We were told by other immigrants in the detention facility that an altercation took place and that there was a use of force by the immigration guards. His early morning transfer after he had spoken to us seemed to have a chilling effect on the immigrants that we spoke to that day. There was a lot of fear that he had been moved and transferred quickly because he had spoken to us.”

Community activists who spoke to detainees in the facility say Rama Carty was threatened, beaten and removed for speaking out about the conditions inside. Anayanse Garza with the Southwest Workers Union told FSRN she is worried about escalating repression of other protesting detainees inside the Port Isabel Detention Center. Ansel Herz, FSRN, Austin.

Listen to the excerpts of my interview with Anayanse Garza below (MP3).

I’ll try to upload my interview with Sarnata Reynolds from Amnesty Intl soon. Garza says individuals and groups around the country need to put pressure on Homeland Security, particularly Special Advisor on ICE and Detention & Removal Dora Schriro, to stop Rama Carty from being deported to Haiti. Get on it, folks!

• Previously on Mediahacker: Activists hold vigil for immigrant detainees on hunger strike
• Listen to Renee Feltz’ interview with Rama Carty from April here.
• For more information, see the Southwest Workers’ Union press release from earlier today here.

The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W. Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails. In four years, the measure could result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation, current and former U.S. officials said.

This is bad news. The Travis County Sheriff’s office joined this program here in Austin not long ago. The vast majority of immigrants caught by ICE here had been charged with misdemeanors. The Post implies that only immigrants convicted of crimes will be deported by this program, but some individuals here have been deported simply because they were arrested and then discovered by ICE agents, two of whom I saw freely walking around at the local jail last year.

I’m printing below the original version of an op-ed piece I wrote for the Daily Texan last summer, entitled “ICE does not belong in Austin’s jail.”

The Travis County Jail looks like an office building. Its clean white walls, dotted with windows, rise five stories high next to a courthouse in Austin’s downtown. Many students know it as the place they might end up if they drink too much during a night out on Sixth Street.

For Austin’s immigrant community, particularly those who are undocumented, the prospect of landing in the jail recently became far more frightening.

In January news broke that Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton was establishing an expanded and permanent office space for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the jail. ICE, a division of Homeland Security, requested the space to beef up its presence in the jail, as part of its escalating enforcement-only approach to immigration. The agency made 4,900 arrests in 2007, almost a tenfold increase from 2002, largely due to hundreds of brazen raids on factories, schools, nightclubs, and workplaces nationwide.

ICE’s raids, like the 15-foot-high border wall, do nothing to address the root causes of illegal immigration. But they generate the kind of insecurity and fear that immigrants in their communities tried to escape when they left home, where economic mobility and human rights are often in short supply, due largely to US-backed “free trade” policies and support for right-wing authoritarians across much of the Global South.

The raids break up families when a parent is suddenly detained or deported. In San Pedro, California, a school principal told the news magazine In These Times that the raids and presence of ICE agents near the school has created a climate of “ongoing, relentless terror,” with more students absent from school or distracted by the possibility of their parents being deported before they arrive home. After a huge ICE raid in Iowa last month, detainees alleged in a federal lawsuit that many immigrants’ children were left stranded with baby sitters and other caretakers.

Once an undocumented worker is in custody, he or she may be drugged and sedated without consent, according to a recent Washington Post report. The paper identified more than 250 cases in which detainees were given “dangerous antipsychotic drugs” before being deported, without any medical reason.

Last year Sen. Ted Kennedy prompted ICE to adopt a set of discretionary humanitarian guidelines, but immigrants rights’ advocates say they are not being enforced. And ICE detainees are often denied a speedy hearing or access to immigration lawyers.

Austin became an official sanctuary city for immigrants in 1997, prohibiting police from checking a person’s immigration status or reporting it to the federal government. But that label is rendered almost meaningless by Sheriff Greg Hamilton’s unilateral decision to facilitate ICE’s expansion into the Travis County Jail. The first three months of this year saw a 400 percent increase in immigration holds placed by federal agents on persons brought to the county jail over last year. 62 percent of those individuals were charged with misdemeanors, and some with no crime at all.

The impact of ICE’s near-24-hour presence in the jail goes well beyond its increased capacity for detaining and deporting inmates. It brings the climate of fear associated with raids and the prospect of deportation into our community. The installation of ICE at the local jail, along with closer cooperation with local police, is a powerful deterrent to immigrants and undocumented workers in Austin from reporting crimes.

“There’s a very bad feeling in the community about ICE to start with,” Jim Harrington, Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told a community forum in March. “When that is tied in with the perception that there’s going to be collusion or cooperation it creates a reluctance on the part of the community to use law enforcement,” he said. Many say that ICE’s office at the jail will lead to an increase in racial profiling.

Even though undocumented workers commit less crimes on average than the general population, this decision puts Austin’s immigrant population at significant risk of inhumane treatment, detention, deportation, and family separation by an agency notorious for its hostility to immigrants. In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, threatening one of the few sanctuaries immigrants have left is not a just or effective solution.

I contributed a short story on this for today’s Free Speech Radio News headlines. Here’s a less edited version of the story, and my original script below that:

Activists held a vigil on the International Bridge in Brownsville, Texas today in solidarity with detainees at the nearby Port Isabel Detention Center. Up to 200 detainees have been on hunger strike for nearly two weeks in protest of the conditions at the facility. Anayanse Garza of the Southwest Workers Union says the detainees are now taking turns on hunger strike in order to maintain their health.

“It’s a federal facility but they contract out to a corporation for the guards. So these guards and ICE officials have been participating in verbal and physical abuse of the detainees/ Also, some of the detainees have health conditions and the health conditions are not being properly treated, they’re not getting proper medical care. Last time we talked to the hunger-strikers they were stressing that there is no one leader, there’s not even a small group of people spearheading this – this is a effort by that was a collective effort by the detainees at the center.”

Garza says Immigraiton and Customs Enforcement have acknowledged that at least one detainee is on hunger strike after issuing an initial denial. Activists met with local Congressmen two days ago to make them aware of the situation at the facility, and they say they are preparing a National Day of Action in solidarity with the detainees on hunger strike.

For more information see my extended interview with Anayanse Garza on this week’s On the Fringe radio show here. Also see Garza’s post at Houston Indymedia.

It’s incredible that these detainees from around the world, some of whom have been detained for more than eighteen months, have managed come together behind prison walls to protest their conditions (much like the DRIVE Movement did on Texas death row). Look for a forthcoming report on solidarity demonstrations during the National Day of Action.

Download the MP3 here. Embed code here. As always, feel free to re-broadcast and share with others.

Transcript below. Sunday evening update: I made a slight correction to the original, so if there was a problem when you tried to listen, try again. Everything’s working now. Also, apologies to Spanish speakers for my terrible pronunciation.

[audio] As the sound of Son Jarocho, traditional music from the Mexican state of Veracruz, echoed off the walls of the Capitol, more than 1000 people prepared to march across downtown Austin on May 1st to demand reforms of immigration policy. They had rallied to almost an hour of impassioned speeches from grassroots organizers – like Wendolnya Menses from the Workers Defense Project.

[audio, English translation: "If we are here, it's because we've been obliged to emigrate to this country, because the U.S. government is causing different kinds of wars in our countries. So they can take our resources from us. They also support dictators in our own countries. Since we are here, now they don't want us. They gather us up in raids and put us in prisons. They call us 'illegal immigrants.' And we as a community, as Spanish-speakers - we say 'Enough is enough!']

The march set off down Congress Avenue, stretching a few city blocks. There was music [audio], chanting [audio] – even a brigade of moms with babies in their strollers. Placards and banners called for the shut down of the Hutto family Detention center, an end to immigration raids on workplaces, and a halt to construction on the border wall. Maria Rodriguez said hard-working immigrants, like her parents, should be made citizens.

[audio: "Many Mexicans are migrants, immigrants, have worked in the fields and have always been for us, there for every American. Not only the Mexicans, the Chinese, even the white people, the Anglo-Saxons were here and they worked for it. So why shouldn't we be allowed? There is many here that you need to give them the rights that everyone else has, their inalienable rights."]

As marchers crossed Cesar Chavez Street and converged on City Hall, Jeshua, a college student, stood in his high school graduation robes. He asked Congress to pass the DREAM Act, which would create a path for undocumented youth to citizenship.

[audio: "A lot of support for the students is what I would like to see, because from when they were little, they didn't have a choice whether to come or not. And a lot of the students here have to suffer, not being able to work or pursue a career, because their parents brought 'em here. So I would like the Congressman and President Obama to support the DREAM Act completely."]

The march was all but ignored by the local TV news media, as journalists stoked fears of the so-called swine flu [audio]. The disease appears to have originated in Veracruz near a sprawling corporate hog farm built just after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the media hype hasn’t explored that angle of the story. It didn’t scare immigrants and their allies out of coming together in the streets to celebrate May Day, either.

This has been a Mediahacker.org podcast. I’m Ansel Herz in Austin. Thanks for listening.

Cross-posted to Houston and radio Indymedia. Podcast has aired on KVRX’s On the Fringe and KPWR. Re-published on May 5 at Wiretapmag.org.

The picture above shows Central American migrants hopping a train to Oaxaca, Mexico en route to the Texas border. See the photo essay, which follows a group of migrants from Chiapas up to Oaxaca at the Narcosphere.

Activists in Tucson, Arizona have been placing life-sized cutouts of Maricopa County’s insidiously regressive anti-immigrant law enforcement officials around town on street corners and at intersections, including one of the chief of armed despicability himself, America’s self-described “toughest sheriff” Joe Arpaio, and another of a Border Patrol agent, presumed to depict Nicholas Corbett, who just recently faced a hung trial for the second time after being charged with the murder of Mexican immigrant Francisco Dominguez in January of 2007.

Via the Wooster Collective.