 "Photo: Derek Stout/The Daily Texan")
While struggling to attain asylum, hundreds of immigrant women are kept behind chain-link fences within a former medium security prison, no more than an hour away from the state Capitol.
The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement T. Don Hutto immigration detention center in Taylor detains illegal immigrants during their immigration court proceedings.
The UT Immigration Clinic, led by director Barbara Hines, has provided legal counsel with her students to low-income immigrants at the center since the summer of 2006. The clinic promotes an on-field approach, which allows some students to visit the center.
The center opened in 2006, and was initially used to detain immigrant families. Lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the clinic in March 2007 stated children were being held under inhumane conditions. A settlement was made five months later, but it was not until August 2009 that ICE announced it would stop housing families.
A review of detention centers released on Oct. 6 by Dora Schriro, the former director of the U.S. Office of Detention Policy and Planning, made recommendations for detention centers. Janet Napolitano, U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, announced reforms for facilities soon after.
According to one reform, the center, which released the last family on Sept. 17, would detain women only. It has worked toward consolidating the female populations from three other facilities: Willacy, Pearsall and Port Isabel.
“By more fully utilizing the facility’s capacity and consolidating the female populations from multiple facilities, this change will yield substantial savings each month,” said ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda.
Hines said Hutto was initially “run like a prison,” with routine cell counts, limited movement and limited medical care. Due to reforms, a gym has since been added and there is more prevalent free movement.
“Many of the settlement’s improvements that we achieved we hope will be continued to be maintained for the women, but the government is not bound by any settlement agreement,” Hines said.
UT law student Ruth Rosenthal works at the clinic and has visited the center with former UT law student — and current attorney for American Gateways — Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who also worked at the clinic.
Rosenthal provided counsel for 25 women and assisted a woman from El Salvador, resulting in the reduction of her bond at the center and subsequent release in October.
“She had a really good asylum claim. Also, at Hutto she developed numerous medical conditions,” Rosenthal said. “There were a lot of humanitarian concerns that compelled her release at Hutto.”
Pruneda said facilities have arrangements with nearby medical centers to provide health care if specific services needed are not available at the facility.
The facility maintains a population of 512 and remains substantially full,Lincoln-Goldfinch said. She said the facility has remained true to the settlement, giving it “a residential feel, rather than a correctional feel,” but policies dictating the retention of detainees may require reformation.
“[Detainees] should be paroled out as soon as they pass a credible fear interview,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said. “You have to show you have been persecuted in the past or [have] a well-founded fear of future persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.”
Pruneda said the average stay for detainees nationwide is 31 days. However, Lincoln-Goldfinch said some women may end up staying six to nine months “because their cases are a bit different.”
Lincoln-Goldfinch said alternatives, such as probation or an ankle-bracelet program, are a more cost-effective means of monitoring illegal immigrants.
“I would hope at some point there would be no Hutto facility in the sense that people would be released into the community more regularly and the government would explore alternatives to detention,” Hines said. “There are other means to ensure immigrants appear at their hearings, which is the rationale the government makes for detaining them in the first place.”
