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| John L. Hill |
Recently, a Venezuelan mother and father, both in their 30s, along with their two children, ages 6 and 8, were arrested trying to enter Canada. They are one of the first families to be jailed at a South Texas immigration detention centre that has been repurposed to hold families facing deportation by President Trump’s order to deport a record number of undocumented immigrants. There are an estimated 6,000 officers whose job it is to find these people.
Once they are found, the next question is where they will be detained. There has been a flurry of activity to repurpose existing properties into privately run immigration detention facilities. The Venezuelan family trying to get into Canada is now being kept at the Karnes County Detention Facility, 80 kilometres southeast of San Antonio, Texas. Such facilities have been criticized for inhumane conditions, lax standards and poor oversight.
The privately run facilities operate by minimizing costs and maximizing profits. That means cutbacks on food and medical care. There have been accusations that employees at these for-profit camps have sexually assaulted migrants, violated their religious freedoms and used punitive measures such as solitary confinement to ensure compliance with operational needs.
Immigration charges are considered civil offences, but they are treated as though criminal charges have been laid without the protections afforded to people under criminal arrest. “It’s really problematic,” said Edna Yang, the co-executive director of the immigration advocacy group American Gateways, while speaking with the Texas Tribune. She added, “With the jail facilities, there are several constitutional protections because you’re in a criminal process and criminal proceedings that aren’t the same in the civil context. Also, a lot of the kinds of protections for individuals in criminal proceedings are enforceable, whereas the civil detention standards are not enforceable — they are guidelines.”
The major criticism of the Trump immigrant roundup is the way it treats children. “It’s just clear from every doctor, lawyer, anybody who cares about children that you are really committing child abuse when you lock up children with their parents,” said Denise Gilman, co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, who is currently teaching at the Georgetown Law Center and was also speaking to the Tribune. “This is government child abuse.”
Even though the children may have been born in the United States and are American citizens, they are being jailed along with their parents and could also face expulsion from the land of their birth.
The families detained at Karnes are a mix of nationalities and have been in the country for varying periods, said Javier Hidalgo, a lawyer with the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), which represents numerous families. RAICES states that the families came from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Brazil.
“It’s not just folks who recently arrived and are being put through expedited removal,” Hidalgo told the Tribune. “It seems like the intent is more punitive, which runs exactly against the whole notion that immigration detention isn’t [the same as criminal incarceration]. ... Immigration detention is supposed to be civil detention — if there really is such a thing — and it can’t be punitive for deterrence.”
John L. Hill practised and taught prison law until his retirement. He holds a J.D. from Queen’s and an LL.M. in constitutional law from Osgoode Hall. He is also the author of Pine Box Parole: Terry Fitzsimmons and the Quest to End Solitary Confinement (Durvile & UpRoute Books) and The Rest of the [True Crime] Story (AOS Publishing.). Contact him at johnlornehill@hotmail.com.
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