12 Expect the Impossible

The man called T. Don Hutto
Must have been some kind of man
‘Cause he’s sure got a man-sized share of fame
It’s not just anybody gets their name put on a building
Where children are held prisoner in their name
The town of Taylor, Texas is not an hour from Austin
But when you’re there you’re in a world away
Look inside the prison yard
Just beyond the chain link fence
You will see young children at their play

You might well stop and ask yourself,
What have these young children done
To be sentenced to such painful loss and fear?
It’s all because their mom or dad
Was caught here without documents
Like twelve million others living here
Now you may think all immigrants
Should go back where they came from
And if they don’t—hell, let ‘em rot in jail
But if it was your own daughter in a cell at T. Don Hutto
With your grandchild in her arms, how would you feel?

What would you do if your own four-
Or six- or eight- or ten-year-old
Was growing up in prison like these kids
Since when in these United States
Do we put kids in prison
Because of what we say their parents did
Call it “family detention,”
Say “We do it for the children”
You’re lying to yourself down to the roots
But call it playing politics
With children’s lives and sanity
You’re getting somewhat closer to the truth

So if you’re down in Austin
Take the highway out to Taylor
Bring some good friends with you for the ride
You might even wear a flag pin
To show you still believe in
The dream for which so many fought and died
Step out onto the highway, turn to face the prison
Stare at those walls ‘til you forget your name
Say a prayer for T. Don Hutto
Say a prayer for all those children
Then close your eyes and hang your head in shame

If I’d been surprised in 1996 when I first learned there was such a thing as for-profit private prisons, I was completely astounded ten years later when I heard one of them was being used to imprison immigrant children as young as infants and as old as seventeen in cells together with their parents.

This was happening, not in some military dictatorship, not in some feudal monarchy, not in some warlord-run country, but right here in the United States of America. In the small rural town of Taylor, Texas, just thirty-five miles northeast of Austin, Corrections Corporation of America had opened its T. Don Hutto Residential Facility, the first private for-profit immigrant family detention center in the country.

Almost from the moment the first families were sent to Taylor in May 2006 and children were locked up with their parents, Grassroots Leadership’s Austin-based organizers started working with a long list of local, state, and national organizations to shut Hutto down, and to get the kids and their parents out of detention. I had listened at meetings of our national staff as our Texas campaign coordinator Bob Libal and our Texas organizer Luissana Santibañez talked about the strategies and tactics they and our partners were developing for the campaign. But the situation itself was so unbelievable, so outrageous, so absurd that it took a while for the reality of what was taking place to hit me emotionally.

I remember the moment it happened. In April 2008, I traveled to Montezuma, a tiny town in the northern New Mexico mountains where Grassroots Leadership’s southwest office is located. We were having a board-staff retreat, and our friend, filmmaker Matthew Gossage, had just finished introducing Hutto: America’s Family Prison, the seventeen-minute film he and Lily Keber had recently finished.

Light dimmed in the room, then brightened on the small portable movie screen. As the camera traveled past the Texas State Capitol, under green and white overhead signs to Interstate 35, past miles and miles of barely rising and falling fields, some brown and barren, some bright with crops, the captions on the screen rolled by, in Spanish and English:

30 miles north of Austin, in the small town of Taylor, Texas, lies the T. Don Hutto facility. Once a medium-security prison, this “residential facility” now houses a new kind of prisoner: immigrant families.

Citizens from over 40 countries have been held in Hutto. They come to the U.S. fleeing persecution, violence and poverty.

With 512 beds, T. Don Hutto can hold 200–300 families a day, including pregnant women and nursing infants, in the largest trend of family internment since WWII.

The camera moves in on a family group. Denia is a former Hutto detainee from Honduras (the film omits the last names of formerly incarcerated speakers to protect them from retribution). Pregnant at the time of her detention, she holds her recently born son in her arms. Her youngest daughter Angie, four years old, sleeps against her shoulder. Her oldest daughter Nexcari, who is nine, sits next to her, wide awake. Denia speaks first:

To tell you the truth, I was really scared. I would say, “Dear God, What am I going to do with a newborn in here?” He would die in this freezing cold. It was so cold, and the worst thing was, they wouldn’t give us enough blankets. I thought we were going to die because of the situation. Or how could I get enough rest if I was prohibited to rest here? I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself properly the way one should after giving birth. I couldn’t have there. To tell you the truth, I was very worried.

The off-camera voice asks, in Spanish, “Do the children suffer much?” Nexcari answers, in the same language, translated into English in the subtitles:

Yes. They suffer a lot. And at the same time they cry because they think that the guards are going to take their moms away.

For me, it was terrible, because every night I would dream that they were scolding my mom, and were taking her to another jail. …They told us that moms that misbehave, and hide cookies in their pockets, would be sent somewhere else, and that they were going to leave their children here, that they were going to separate the children from their moms.

Denia and her children were incarcerated at Hutto with about one hundred and fifty other families. Between May 1, 2006, and May 23, 2009, over thirty-eight hundred children, women, and men from more than fifteen hundred families were detained in the for-profit facility. Every single one of these parents had been imprisoned with their children in the cells at Hutto for a minor civil violation: being in the United States without the appropriate documents, a condition they shared with twelve million other people.

Why had this small group of children and parents been targeted for detention? What had happened, in the United States and in Texas, that we were now forcing young children to grow up in prison?

Well, for one thing, ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security, was trying to make an example of them. This appalling strategy, which flies in the face of all ideas about equal justice, was based on the mistaken idea that imprisoning a small number of children together with their parents would deter other families from migrating to the United States. In effect, it punished one group of families in an effort to change the potential behavior of migrating and asylum-seeking families around the world.

In fact, increased family detention, militarization, and privatization along the border had the exact opposite effect. Large numbers of seasonal workers who came annually to the United States with legal work visas were no longer sure whether, if they went home, they would be able to return the next year. So they stayed, even after their visas expired. As a result, the number of undocumented immigrants went up rather than down.

For another thing, President George W. Bush and his advisers had decided that anti-immigrant rhetoric and action was an effective way to help elect and reelect their conservative friends. The raw anti-Black ranting that had sustained and reelected right-wing white politicians for so many years, most heavily in the South but also in other areas of the country, was no longer publicly acceptable. Given the millions of African Americans who had become enfranchised since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many of whom were concentrated in key congressional districts around the country, it also constituted a form of political near-suicide.

But the old raw racist rhetoric wasn’t really gone. It had just been replaced by heavily coded “tough on crime” language. Being seen as tough on crime would, at the very least, help you get elected or reelected; being labeled as “soft on crime” would almost certainly get you defeated.

So, even though immigration is in no sense a crime, candidates could ramp up their chances for election by adding immigrant bashing to their arsenal of law-and-order campaign rhetoric. Although these candidates rarely talked specifically about the race or ethnicity of the “illegal aliens” they were attacking, everyone knew exactly about whom they were talking.

Another reason for the sudden growth of immigrant detention, including immigrant family detention, was that it involved very big money for the for-profit private prison corporations and their shareholders. Here, for example, is Steve Logan, at the time CEO of Cornell Corrections, speaking to investors on a conference call shortly after 9/11:

It can only be good . . . with the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent. . . . In the United States there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent. . . . That’s half of our entire prison population. . . . The federal business is the best business for us . . . and the events of September 11 [are] increasing that level of business.

But it wasn’t only the private prison corporations who saw themselves as benefiting from the immigrant detention boom. Small towns and rural areas throughout the United States, which forty years ago would have fought tooth and nail against having any kind of prison, jail, or detention center located nearby, were now fighting even harder to get them. Made desperate by the loss of jobs and the departure of their young people for greener urban pastures, these towns and counties had come to see immigrant detention centers as their only hope for economic stability. José Orta, an activist in Taylor, Texas, where Hutto is located, had it exactly right when he said,

A lot of people in Taylor saw it as an economic boom for the community. Most small towns that were losing manufacturing jobs were looking for a way to create something stable. Prisons for profit are very profitable. But they’re not profitable to the community that they’re based in. They’re profitable to the shareholders of that corporation.

Even in Taylor, despite intense community pressure to go along in order to get along, principled local activists like José Orta raised their voices against having a private for-profit immigrant family detention center located in their community. Across Texas, the voices swelled to a chorus. Week after week, students, faith leaders, trade unionists, immigrant rights organizers, teachers, activists working on a dozen different causes traveled to Hutto from across the state to demonstrate, to show their solidarity with the families on the inside. Stretched out along the highway across from the chain link fence that separated the children and their parents from the world, they held up signs that read “A two-year-old is not a terrorist,” “First they came for the Muslims,” “Texas shame,” “Prison is never in the best interest of a child”—all the time chanting, “Close Hutto now! Close Hutto now! Close Hutto now!”

You rabble-rousers, you activists, you quiet lovers of justice: Don’t ever let anyone tell you that demonstrations were only effective in the 1960s, that in the twenty-first century we need to find other ways to make our voices heard that are less, well, confrontational. For the most part, those who say that now aren’t the ones who were on those civil rights, feminist, LGBTQ, labor, and anti-Vietnam war picket lines. They were on the other side, building their careers rather than the Movement. If they were in fact part of the Movement at that time, but are now trying to gain prestige and wealth by denouncing what they and the rest of us did—well, we know what such people are called.

The initial phase of the campaign to close Hutto, between 2006 and 2008, was effective because it was a cooperative coalitional effort, bringing together organizations with a wide range of skills, experiences, and expertise. The first vigil at the detention center took place in December 2006, organized by Grassroots Leadership and Texans United for Families (TUFF), and preceded by a three-day walk from the Texas Capitol by Border Ambassador Jay Johnson-Castro. A lawsuit brought on behalf of ten of the families by the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic and the ACLU, which represented Hutto detainees in immigration court, not only improved conditions, but also brought media attention to what was going on inside the facility.

The Women’s Refugee Commission’s report Locking Up Family Values focused a microscope on conditions at Hutto, further raising the campaign’s profile. Courageous members of the Family Justice Alliance in Williamson County, where Hutto is located, helped organize dozens of vigils at the facility. The Free the Children Coalition organized caravans and brought people to the vigils month after month from San Antonio, South Texas, Houston, Dallas, College Station, and other areas of the state. Amnesty International helped organize a large Hutto vigil in June 2007 for International Refugee Day.

Watch the film Hutto: America’s Family Prison, and you’ll see the continuing power of mass demonstrations and cooperative direct action campaigns. Here is Luissana Santibañez, at the time a student at the University of Texas and a Grassroots Leadership organizing intern, now a member of our staff, pounding on a drum and shouting out for justice. Here is former Hutto detainee Elsa, testifying on the makeshift stage:

I was in there for six months, and it was one of the saddest things to see my children suffer in there. Unfortunately, my children weren’t the only ones there. There were many other children suffering, very many. Just imagine being locked up 24 hours a day, and seeing your children say, “Take me out of here.”

Now Texas Indigenous Council leader Antonio Díaz is on the stage, his passionate voice stirring up the crowd:

They cannot be seen behind those walls. So we’re here to let ourselves be seen and counted. And saying “We care.” We care. We care enough to want to shut it down. We cannot stand silently by and not denounce those prisons for profit that are right there in front of us. And they’re all around our state right now. These people are not criminals. No criminal charges against them at all. They’re refugees. Crimes are being committed against them.

He’s right. We do care. We care a lot. That’s what it means to be an organizer, a community leader, a member of the Movement.

But was all the care in the world enough to shut Hutto down, when set against the combined forces of ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush administration, Corrections Corporation of America, and the for-profit private prison industry?

Like many of my coworkers and friends, I hoped that help would come via the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Immigration reform was clearly going to land squarely on the new administration’s table. Trying to analyze the dynamics of the situation, I almost persuaded myself that the new administration might, in its first hundred days, actually move to close Hutto and end immigrant family detention. There were political points to be scored by being seen as tough on undocumented immigrants, I figured, but very few to be gained by locking up four-year-olds.

Meanwhile, with help from Grassroots Leadership and our many allies, Hutto was well on its way to becoming a national and international scandal. An article by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker on March 3, 2008, titled “The Lost Children,” helped raise Hutto’s profile and concern for the families imprisoned there. Needless to say, it didn’t exactly help Corrections Corporation of America and their good friends at ICE when the New York Times reported that Jorge Bustamante, a special representative from the United Nations, was denied access to Hutto. Bustamante did manage to interview some of the detainees after their release, and said,

There was public information, complaints about the violation of human rights to children. And children are part of the most vulnerable migrants in the whole context of human rights. I heard a three-year-old asking his mother, “Mom, why is God not helping us? If He is so powerful, why he doesn’t tell these people that we are not bad people?”

Corrections Corporation of America and ICE may have barred Bustamante from inspecting Hutto, and they certainly refused to give an interview to filmmakers Matthew Gossage and Lily Keber, as well as many other members of the media. But ICE apparently failed to pass the word to all of their staff members that they should at least try to show a little discretion and good judgment when dealing with the public. It’s kind of fun to imagine their reaction when they heard the recording of the interview that ICE regional spokesperson Nina Pruneda gave on Austin’s KUT radio station:

The family facility where they’re being detained, this barbed wire that you see out here is for the safety of those that we have housed inside of the facility. We have to protect them, because English is not their first language. It’s their second language. And so we have to make sure that they’re secure and they’re safe.

Brilliant!! Why hadn’t we thought of that? That explains everything.

Of course, if it hadn’t been for ICE, the immigrant families now incarcerated in Hutto wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

For a while, it was possible to hope that the new administration might mean a change in policies for immigrant detention and immigrant family detention. But, pretty soon, it became clear the political wind was blowing the other way.

Here’s what was happening. The United States has an estimated twelve million people living, working, and paying taxes within our borders who don’t have documents. What almost no one knows is that not one of these twelve million has what’s called “a path to citizenship.” There is no way they can become a U.S. citizen except to leave here, go back to their country of origin, and apply for a visa to come back. If they’re lucky enough to get the visa—highly unlikely in the case of low-income would-be immigrants—and arrive in the United States, they can then apply to become a citizen.

Furthermore, for most people who want to immigrate to the United States, there’s simply no legal way to do so. Even those who are fleeing conflict and violence have no real mechanism for documented immigration.

Today, my maternal grandmother Rae Sterling Aronson, who fled Poland in the 1890s after horseback-mounted Cossacks rampaged through her community in a state-sponsored pogrom, would almost certainly have had no legal way to come to this country and safety.

The current situation is as unfair as it’s unrealistic. Though many immigrants came to the United States because they were economically unable to care for their families, others fled their home countries because they were at risk of torture and execution. They were not immigrants, but political refugees seeking asylum. To send them back would in many cases be a virtual death sentence.

In fact, many of the parents imprisoned with Denia at Hutto requested asylum at the border crossing. They were never in this country without papers, since they began a legal asylum process immediately—but they were still detained.

The right wing, ignoring all practical and humanitarian concerns, had a simple answer: Get rid of every single immigrant who doesn’t have documents. The truth, though, is that there’s no way the United States is going to send twelve million people “back where they came from”—although in 2007 the Department of Homeland Security published an official report in which they planned doing exactly that.

Still, while right-wing candidates, elected officials, and talk radio hosts may rant about deporting every undocumented immigrant, even they know it’s not going to happen. It’s just a convenient way to play the race card that got stuck back in the deck when African Americans developed serious voting power— as those who are now undocumented immigrants will do not long from now.

Furthermore, it’s not as if these twelve million U.S. residents, some of whom had been in the country for decades, had arrived uninvited. As Frank Sharry, founder of America’s Voice, a national organization that works to realize the promise of workable and humane comprehensive immigration reform, often says, “We’ve got a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign at the border, and a ‘Help Wanted’ sign a hundred yards in.”

If the right-wingers thought they had a solution, corporate America was under no such illusions. The great majority of the twelve million undocumented immigrants who were not children were hard workers. Deport them all, and whole U.S. industries would collapse for lack of employees, from agribusiness and construction to hotels and restaurants.

So there were many reasons for the Obama administration to push for federal legislation that made citizenship a real option for as many of the twelve million as possible. It was not only the right thing to do, it would be a solid investment in the Democratic Party’s future. Millions of freed slaves and their descendants had never forgotten that it was Republican president Abraham Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As a result, African Americans had voted Republican for generations, switching allegiance to the Democrats only during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The leaders of the Democratic Party hoped and expected that the newly minted citizens would have similarly long memories and, as my bluegrass buddies would say, remember to “dance with them what brung them.”

But pro-citizenship Democrats from President Obama on down also knew how hard they were going to be hit for taking that stance. True, there were ready, common-sense, workable solutions available. Still, for their party’s long-term self-interest, they needed to protect their flanks, particularly from the attacks they knew would come from the right.

The new administration had another option, which presented a potentially serious danger to efforts, not just to close Hutto, but to end all immigrant detention. They could trade legalization for more detention and border enforcement, coming down even harder on some immigrants, attempting to create a deterrent by making an example of them, hitting them with the full force of the law. If the new administration chose to expand rather than abolish immigrant family detention, it could lay claim to being both “tough on crime” (regardless of the fact that the detainees were not in any sense criminals) and “tough on illegal immigrants.”

Whether this would in any way protect their vulnerable flanks against conservative attacks, or make a path to citizenship more politically realistic, was another question. But the option to make immigrant family detention even more extreme than it had been was definitely there. For Grassroots Leadership, there was clearly no time to lose, if we were really going to get the families out of Hutto.

Given the alignment of forces nationally, and the high stakes involved politically and economically, most reasonable people would have said, “That’s impossible. You’ll never get those kids out of there.”

But we’re not “reasonable people.” We’re organizers. We expect the impossible—and we know how to do our work in situations that others see as hopeless. One way or another, Grassroots Leadership and our local, state, and national allies were going to get those kids and their parents out of Hutto.