Letter to Obama in 2014 to Close Family Detention Center
Detention Center Presented as Deterrent to Border Crossings
DILLEY, Tex. — Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, came to this South Texas outpost on Mon to open the country's largest clearing detention facility and draw attending to border security measures that are function of President Obama's fiercely debated executive actions on immigration.
While Mr. Obama has offered protection from displacement and work permits to millions of unauthorized immigrants, he has besides ordered efforts to reinforce the southwest border to prevent a new surge of illegal immigration. The 50-acre center in Dilley, 85 miles northeast of Laredo, volition hold up to two,400 migrants who take illegally crossed the border and is especially designed to agree women and their children.
Standing on a dirt road lined with cabins in a barren compound enclosed by fencing, Mr. Johnson delivered a blunt message to families without legal papers because a trip to the United States: "It will now be more probable that you will be detained and sent dorsum."
Republicans take assailed Mr. Obama'south measures, maxim he overstepped his constitutional dominance with a sweeping programme of deportation reprieves that they predict volition concenter another moving ridge of migrants similar the one in Texas' Rio Grande Valley this summer.
Republican leaders have vowed to halt the programs when their party takes control of Congress next calendar month. More than 20 states, led by Republican officials in Texas, take sued to stop the federal regime from issuing the deportation reprieves.
But the administration'southward huge expansion of family detention has drawn similarly angry criticism from advocates, lawyers and organized religion leaders on the other side, who argue that prolonged confinement is inappropriate for young children and mothers who pose no security risks. Until now, the largest permanent facility for migrant families was a eye in Pennsylvania with most 100 beds.
"Information technology is inhumane to business firm young mothers with children in restrictive detention facilities as if they are criminals," Bishop Eusebio Elizondo of Seattle, the chairman of the Usa Briefing of Cosmic Bishops' Committee on Migration, said Mon. "Already traumatized from their journey, these families are very vulnerable and demand care and support, non further emotional and psychological harm."
Mr. Johnson said the administration was making "a sharp distinction between past and future," with contempo border crossers now in the highest priority category for deportation.
He chastised Republicans in Congress who expressed dismay at Mr. Obama's executive actions past funding the Department of Homeland Security through just the end of February in a spending pecker passed last weekend.
Mr. Johnson said the curt-term funding had created doubtfulness for the department's border and counterterrorism missions, including complicating funding for new detention beds.
"This facility costs money," Mr. Johnson said. The Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison company that will run the center, estimates the cost at $296 a day for each detainee, officials said.
"Anybody agrees that border security is of import," Mr. Johnson said, addressing his comments to Congress. "Now information technology's fourth dimension to stride up and partner with this section to help support that."
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The eye here, benignly named the Southward Texas Family unit Residential Center, is to house women with their children while their deportation cases move through the courts. Scrambling to answer to the surge of families across the Rio Grande this summertime, Homeland Security officials opened a temporary centre for 700 migrants on a law enforcement campus in Artesia, a remote town in southeast New Mexico. The last migrants in Artesia will be transferred out this week and the heart closed, officials said.
Dilley will brainstorm receiving migrants in coming days. Officials refurbished barracks that had been a army camp for workers in this oil and gas boomtown. About 480 women and children volition exist housed here while a much larger, permanent facility is built side by side door, officials said.
During a guided tour Mon, reporters saw orderly cabins that seemed likely to provide relief, at least initially, for migrants, many from Central America, afterwards the punishing journey to the border. Each motel, designed for up to 8 people, was furnished with a small-scale kitchen, couches and a flat-screen television. On the wall in the bathroom were instructions on the use and disposal of toilet paper.
In the bedrooms were bunk beds and cribs stocked with babe jumpsuits and blankets, diapers, tiny socks and toys — reminders of the young detainees to come. In a mobile trailer was a nursery school, run past a individual contractor, with small chairs and colorful playspaces. A classroom for older children had computers and a sign saying: "Welcome! Bienvenido!"
Children volition attend schoolhouse five hours a day five days a week, an clearing official said. There was a children's library stocked with books, and an outside jungle gym.
In contrast to the Artesia center, where lawyers constitute severely express access to detainees and cramped spaces for court hearings, officials have set upward three formal immigration courtrooms in Dilley, complete with wooden benches. Judges will hear cases by videoconference.
Mr. Johnson tried to exit no doubt that the administration was committed to detaining families. "l believe this is an effective deterrent," he said.
Many women at Artesia have said they did non wait to be detained if they fabricated information technology to the U.s., Mr. Johnson said. The numbers of people in families detained at the border has dropped to nearly a two-year low, he said.
"Frankly, nosotros want to ship a message that our border is not open to illegal migration, and if you come here, you should non expect to simply be released," Mr. Johnson said.
Many advocates are determined to fight the administration's plans. Lawyers and mental health professionals who assisted women in Artesia said prolonged detention had proved damaging to mothers and their children.
Many of the women were fleeing astringent sexual corruption and domestic violence at home. A group of lawyers from the American Clearing Lawyers Association represented 12 women in Artesia whose asylum claims were heard past judges, and the women won every case. The women, ofttimes revealing their experiences for the first time, told stories of series rape by husbands and beatings of their children with belts and pistols.
One woman was granted asylum later on she fled a gang that killed her blood brother, shot her husband and kidnapped and raped her 14-year-old stepdaughter.
Stephen Manning, an immigration lawyer who led the team, said the legal try in Artesia had relied on volunteers who came from as far away as Portland, Ore., and Chicago. The lawyers association does non have the capability to mountain a new volunteer attempt in Dilley for many more than migrants, Mr. Manning said. Homeland Security officials take insisted on requiring high bond for the women to be released, he said.
"I have no idea what we will do," Mr. Manning said. "I'm at a loss for words to imagine what Dilley will expect similar with then many 6-year-olds detained behind razor wire."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/homeland-security-chief-opens-largest-immigration-detention-center-in-us.html
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