13 Know When to Raise the Stakes
In the city of Warsaw, such a long time ago
Two hundred children stand lined row on row
With their freshly washed faces
And freshly washed clothes
The children of Poland, who never grow old
In the orphanage yard not a child remains
The soldiers have herded them down to the trains
Carry small flasks of water and bags of dry bread
To march in the ranks of the unquiet dead
With their small Jewish faces and pale haunted eyes
They march hand in hand down the street
No one cries, no one laughs
No one looks, no one turns, no one talks
As they walk down the streets
Where my grandparents walked
Had my grandparents stayed in that dark bloody land
My own children too
Would have marched hand in hand
To the beat of the soldiers, the jackbooted stamp
That would measure their lives
‘Til they died in those camps
The cries of my children at night take me back
To those pale hollow faces in stark white and black
Only the blood of the children remains
It runs in the streets—and it runs in our veins
It has to be said that I took the incarceration of children and families at Hutto very personally. Growing up, I spent hours staring at the Nazi propaganda photographs my uncle Charlie Aronson, my mother’s younger brother, had found during his Army service in Europe in World War II and given to me. I was mesmerized and shaken by images of grinning Nazi soldiers rounding up terrified Jewish families and marching them, hands stretched high in the air, six-pointed yellow stars on their sleeves, to destinations from which almost none of them would ever return. I sat with Mom and Pop looking through old family photo albums, dramatic in black and white.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the photo of a handsome woman in a long black dress.
“That’s your great-grandmother.”
“What happened to her?”
“We don’t know. The letters stopped coming in 1943.”
But when the film Hutto: America’s Family Prison refers to “the largest trend of family internment since World War II,” it isn’t talking about what the Nazis did in Europe. The reference is to what we did right here in the United States. President Ronald Reagan, in his remarks just before signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, said it exactly like it was:
We gather here today to right a grave wrong. . . . More than forty years ago . . . 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race.
Based solely on race? Well, yes, you might say that. In fact, to a remarkable extent, the debate in the United States around immigration has always really been about race. Just as the raw racism against African Americans had helped justify putting hundreds of thousands into the convict lease system and onto chain gangs; just as Japanese Americans had been demonized in the early 1940s so that the public would support moving over one hundred thousand human beings into what were in effect American concentration camps; so now self-interested voices were stirring up fear of and hatred against immigrants. They may not have said the words, but everyone knew about whom they were talking. As I wrote in a review of Mark Dow’s excellent book American Gulag, in the journal New Politics, about immigrant detention in the United States and the role of the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), forerunner to today’s ICE:
Prisons, after all, are about many things, and different things at different times. But in the U.S., they are always about race. The INS, in the current Home Sweet Homeland Security era, is not just detaining immigrants. It is very specifically detaining immigrants of color. New York reportedly has over a hundred thousand undocumented immigrants from Ireland alone, but you don’t see INS agents raiding the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
By early 2008, the campaign to close Hutto was going well, building momentum. If we could shut Hutto, we could then shift our attention to the much smaller immigrant family detention center in Berks County, Pennsylvania, just a little distance from Philadelphia. If we could close both Hutto and Berks County, that would mean at least a temporary end to immigrant family detention, the closing of a sordid chapter in this country’s history.
Then, on May 18, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that ICE had issued a “pre-solicitation notice” that stated in part:
This pre-solicitation is for the procurement of up to three (3) non-criminal family residential facilities with the capacity to house a maximum population of 200 residents each using minimal security for juveniles and their families in a safe and secure environment while in the custody of the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is expected families may be comprised of a ratio of up to three (3) juveniles to every one (1) adult.
We were stunned. Translated into everyday language, the notice meant that ICE was planning to expand, not eliminate, the practice of immigrant family detention.
Now we weren’t just talking about Texas and Pennsylvania. If ICE succeeded in establishing these three new facilities, filling them with immigrant children and their parents, immigrant family detention would be institutionalized as a permanent part of the U.S. response to immigration. “Family detention centers,” by any name, would become the wave of the future, and a lot of people would drown in that wave.
Could Grassroots Leadership organize a national campaign to end immigrant family detention once and for all? Was it time to raise the stakes?
So how does an organization with a total personnel roster of seven full-time paid staff, two volunteers working half time, and one student research intern take on a national campaign against the combined forces of ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush administration, and the for-profit private prison industry? And these are only the main players fighting, not only to keep Hutto open, but to expand and institutionalize immigrant family detention, so that even more kids would be growing up in prison.
To paraphrase the Beatles: We get by with a little help from our friends.
But first you need to find out if your friends are willing and able to help—and, if they are, whether all of you working together are really going to be able to get by.
To those who haven’t done organizing, the answer would probably seem simple. If the issue is critical, you just make the decision to take it on, and then work to develop what you hope will be a winning strategy.
In fact, as experienced organizers know, the answer is exactly the opposite. First you put together the most promising potential strategies and tactics you can imagine, developing as many alternatives as you can. Then you evaluate each possible approach to the issue, your organizational skills and capacities, the nature and reliability of your potential allies. Only when it’s clear there is a strategy that makes sense and has a realistic shot at winning do you decide to take on the campaign.
Through the summer and fall of 2008, that’s what we did. Working with Grassroots Leadership’s then volunteer communications coordinator Carol Sawyer, now a member of the staff, we developed potential arguments and talking points aimed at different constituencies. Emails carried hard questions back and forth. Who has the authority to close these facilities? Were we better off trying to get a presidential executive order, or working to get federal legislation passed? If supporters were going to make only one phone call, send one email, write one letter, what should it say? To whom should it go? If we decided to take on a national campaign, what name for the campaign would appeal to the broadest range of potential supporters? What alternatives to family detention would make sense to people who had only a passing knowledge of the issue?
As Luissana, Bob, and I traveled the country, separately and together, we continued to explore options and allies. In New York, the three of us pulled together a meeting with some of the organizations we hoped would play a role in a national campaign. Bob and Luissana presented our thinking, the strategies and tactics we thought might prove effective. We listened as the activists present gave us feedback, critique, and new ideas to consider. We met with some of our closest long-term allies and partners, cutting-edge organizations such as the Detention Watch Network, whose involvement would be key to any campaign we tried to launch.
Slowly a consensus emerged: Not only was it critical that Grassroots Leadership organize a national Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention (by now we had agreed to use that name if we decided to move forward), we actually had the ability, the capacity, the partners and allies to do it.
We could afford to raise the stakes.
For almost thirty years, the Grassroots Leadership board of directors has held its annual meeting the weekend after Election Day. Some years, looking at the results, we just do our best to keep each other from sinking into depression. Other years are mixed: a victory here, a defeat there.
The gathering in November 2008 was celebratory and hopeful. Not only had Barack Obama been elected, many progressives around the country had won their races. In South Carolina, the winners included former Grassroots Leadership board co-chair Anton Gunn, an African American elected to the state House of Representatives in a majority-white district, and former staff member Kamau Marcharia, reelected to the Fairfield County Commission.
In formal meetings, in the hallways, over drinks, in different combinations, we talked. Yes, we agreed, a national Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention made sense. It was the right thing to do. There was a thoughtful plan we believed we could carry out. Our long-term allies were with us. There was no assurance of victory, but, as I’ve said earlier, if you don’t fight, you lose every time.
When the board meeting was over, Luissana, Bob, and I drove up into the North Carolina mountains. In a cabin just below the Blue Ridge Parkway, over moonshine and wine, we fine-tuned plans for the campaign. When we came down, we were as ready as we’d ever be.
It was Bob Libal’s idea to launch the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention the day after inauguration day. President Obama would have his first hundred days. We would have ours.
Via email blasts, Facebook, and phone calls, the call went out to our friends and allies, asking them to be part of what we were now calling “100 Days, 100 Actions.” To kick off the series of events, organizers from Austin and San Antonio held a vigil at the San Antonio ICE office. Over the course of the hundred days, groups around the country gathered to watch Hutto: America’s Family Prison; held parties at which everyone wrote to the new administration, asking for an end to immigrant family detention; and organized vigils in front of the T. Don Hutto facility and at ICE offices. Via Facebook, we launched a petition drive, asking people to add their names to a statement addressed to President Barack Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano:
Immigrant children and their families should not be held behind bars. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) incarcerates entire families while they await immigration hearings, often for months on end. Corrections Corporation of America operates the infamous T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, Texas for profit.
There are alternatives to family detention that keep families together and out of jail. ICE should release families on personal recognizance, use reasonable personal bonds, and provide limited supervised release programs.
Instead of implementing these programs, ICE has proposed the construction of three new family detention centers. We, the undersigned, call for the immediate closing of the T. Don Hutto detention center and an end to family detention.
Within a month, over fifty thousand people had signed the petition. The signers came not only from the United States, but also from dozens of countries around the world. Clearly, the word was beginning to get out. People were not only listening, they were taking action.
That was the whole point. To launch the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention successfully, we had to get the word out much more broadly than we had before. Film screenings and letter-writing parties may involve a couple dozen people at a time, and are critical to any campaign. But they don’t in and of themselves create enough momentum and visibility to begin to influence national policy.
Unlike the for-profit private prison corporations, small nonprofit organizations such as Grassroots Leadership don’t have the financial resources to hire media consultants and purchase paid advertising. So we turn to what’s called “free media,” organizing events that the media will want, or have to, cover. For all media, these events need to be dramatic; for TV, they need to be visual as well.
One highly visual event was the annual pre-Christmas vigil at Hutto. On Saturday, December 20, 2008—even before the official launch of the campaign—organizers delivered more than five hundred toys, books, and children’s clothes to the facility. Unable to gain entrance to the detention center, they piled their gifts onto tables in front of the facility. Eventually, some Hutto employees came out, gathered the packages, and took them inside to give to the children who couldn’t get out—but not before the cameras had rolled, bringing the images of detention and toys to a broader audience.
Then there was Valentines Day. Over the Internet, we sent out the word:
About 130 children will be incarcerated on Valentines Day. The warden at the T. Don Hutto family detention center won’t tell us their names, but the children at Hutto need to know we’re thinking of them. Send them Valentines!
Of course, you don’t want to send a Valentine designed for a four-year-old to a seventeen-year-old. So, just below our message, we included a heartbreaking list with the ages of the littlest Hutto prisoners:
5—infants
5—one-year-olds
10—two- and three-year-olds
15—four- and five-year olds
15—six- and seven-year-olds
15—eight- and nine-year-olds
15—ten- and eleven-year-olds
15—twelve- and thirteen-year-olds
20—fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds
15—sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds
If the warden, in providing us with the ages of the children, had rounded the numbers off a little, it was close enough to the truth. People responded. The Students for a Democratic Society chapter at the University of Houston wrote that they’d sent eighty-five valentines to the detained children as part of their “Love Across Borders” program, and wanted to organize an event at Hutto the next month.
When it came to the media, we also got by with a little help from our friends. The timing of award-winning author Courtney E. Martin’s article in The American Prospect Online on the second of February couldn’t have been better:
First and foremost, immigrant family detention must stop. On Jan. 21, Grassroots Leadership . . . launched a campaign with this goal, calling it 100 Actions in 100 Days. Given the new administration, hope for immigration reform, and a renewed focus on addressing corporate corruption, it’s an opportune time to reactivate the country around this issue.
In March, at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, we organized around the release of The Least of These, a documentary featuring the stories of many of the families detained at Hutto. The film sparked another wave of national media scrutinizing the prison.
The word was certainly getting out, not just in the United States but internationally. TV crews from Japan and France came to Hutto. So did the entire Grassroots Leadership board and staff, watching from across the road while Matthew Gossage filmed me standing in front of the giant immigrant family detention center, singing my new song Hutto, so we could get it up on our website.
We were definitely getting by with a little help from our friends. As it happens, many of my personal friends are musicians, poets, storytellers, actors, and assorted other artists. When you’re a creative community organizer, you go not only with what you know, but with whom you know.
We live in the Internet age, but personal relationships still count, especially when you’re asking people to do something. We wanted artists to become active in the campaign. So we decided to organize a new group, Artists United to End Immigrant Family Detention. To help launch Artists United, Carol Sawyer created an e-toolkit for the Grassroots Leadership website. The e-toolkit included everything any artist would need, including sample text and the campaign logo that they could include in their newsletter or on their website.
Most importantly, it had a list of things they could do. Too often, when we ask a potential volunteer for help on a campaign, the conversation goes like this:
Organizer: I’m really hoping you’ll be able to help us on this campaign.
PV: I’d love to. What can I do?
Organizer: We have so many needs, whatever you do will be great.
PV: I’m glad to help any way I can.
Organizer: That’s wonderful! Thank you so much.
In this situation, it’s doubtful that the potential volunteer will do anything or that, if they do, it will actually be helpful to the campaign. More effective when recruiting volunteers is to give them a specific list of things the campaign needs and let them choose. For Artists United, the list we put on the Grassroots Leadership website and handed out as we traveled looked like this:
Grassroots Leadership invites artists, musicians, and poets to help spread the word about immigrant family detention. What YOU can do:
Publicly endorse the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention
Make a brief announcement about the Campaign at your concerts and, where appropriate, pass the hat and send contributions to the Campaign
Write and/or record a song about immigrant family detention
Put information about the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention on your website and in your newsletters
Include a link to Grassroots Leadership on your e-newsletters asking your fans to support the Campaign by joining the Action Team
Mention the Campaign when you are interviewed on the radio or in other media
Help create a multi-artist CD to be distributed to DJs internationally
Include a note about the Campaign on your next CD asking folks to sign up and contribute at the Grassroots Leadership website
Distribute or display campaign materials at your merchandise table
Include logos, text, and tools from the e-toolkit in your newsletters, website, and other materials
In Memphis in February, we set up a booth at the Folk Alliance conference, the annual gathering of the folk music community. Carol Sawyer and LaWana Mayfield, coordinator of Grassroots Leadership’s Mecklenburg Justice Project in Charlotte, North Carolina, worked the booth; I worked the crowd. Over one hundred and forty people joined.
For that occasion and, now that I think of it, from inauguration day on, I never changed T-shirts. Just so you don’t worry about my commitment to public health, let me be absolutely clear: I wore different T-shirts, but they were all identical. For a weeklong trip, I’d pack at least three, all of them black with white lettering, that read “End Immigrant Family Detention. No more families behind bars.” The letters were literally behind bars themselves. Underneath, in black letters on white, was our website: www.GrassrootsLeadership.org.
It was fun being a walking human billboard. In general, my preferred mode was the T-shirt alone with jeans. It was printed on both front and back, so everyone could see me coming and going. Besides, it was summer. If the temperature dropped, I’d put the shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt or sweatshirt. For more formal occasions, I’d wear the T-shirt under a sport jacket. Over time, I became expert at holding the lapels back with my elbows, so the entire message could be seen and read.
I flew to Texas on the first Monday of August 2009. Bob Libal met me at the Austin airport. We drove down César Chávez Boulevard to the Grassroots Leadership office, which we share with our friends and landlords PODER, a vibrant local organization that has worked for years on issues of environmental racism. In the back room that passed for conference space, over endless cups of coffee and a steady stream of breakfast tacos, we spent two days analyzing and debriefing the campaign.
There was good news and bad news. On the one hand, we agreed, our work and that of our allies had helped make Hutto the best-known (and probably worst-liked) immigrant detention center and the most notorious for-profit private prison in the United States. People and organizations all over the country had taken part in our 100 Days, 100 Actions kickoff and were continuing to take actions.
Media, both new and traditional, had been at least as good as we’d expected. Almost seventy thousand people had signed our Facebook petition, and nearly four thousand had joined our “Cause.” We were communicating with all of them regularly. Several members of Artists United had written songs about Hutto and were working to support the campaign. Our allies in Washington were working hard to make sure the grassroots organizing message was being heard in the halls of Congress and at the White House.
On the other hand, the Obama administration, which had taken office the day before we launched the campaign, hadn’t shown any signs of acting to eliminate immigrant family detention. There were rumors that they might move to improve the appalling conditions in all immigrant detention centers by placing federal monitors in them—from our perspective a move in the wrong direction, making it even harder to shut Hutto down. We still hadn’t a clue where ICE planned to put the three new immigrant detention centers, or even whether they’d secretly signed contracts to build them.
It was time to raise the stakes again. The next step, we decided, would be to take the seventy-thousand-name petition to Washington, to try to present it to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The Detention Watch Network was holding a national meeting in late September, which many of our key allies would be attending. We would ask them all to join us in a major media event, perhaps in front of the White House.
The next day, Wednesday, August 5, Bob, Luissana, and I drove to Houston to interview potential organizers for the new office Grassroots Leadership was opening in that city. The candidates were wonderful. The interviews were exciting as well as informative.
Afterwards, satisfied with a good three days’ work, we sat at the round table in the coffeehouse where we’d been holding court since early morning, finally eating lunch and, in deference to the fact that we were after all in Texas, happily drinking longnecks. I was in a great mood, glad to be with such fine coworkers and friends, looking forward to the rest of my time in the state.
I was just drifting off to sleep—a lifetime trait anyone who knows me is more than familiar with—when I heard Bob shout. I woke with a start. He was staring at the screen on his iPhone.
“What’s wrong?” I imagined the worst.
“There’s about to be a major announcement from the White House. The administration is going to issue a new policy on immigrant detention.”
I froze. Was this the moment we’d hoped for—or the moment we’d dreaded? Would they close Hutto, perhaps even end immigrant family detention once and for all? Would they announce that they were going to build three new family detention centers? Were we about to win—or about to lose?
The coffeehouse closed for the day. Being creative community organizers, we decided on the only possible strategic option.
We went to a bar.
We sat there on the stools, side by side, Luissana, Bob, and I. By now, emails and text messages were coming in from all over the country, and the rumors were flying. We were flying, too, with anxiety and hope.
The tension kept building as the hours went by. At about 7:45 P.M. Texas time, I couldn’t take it any more. I called Elizabeth Minnich at our home in Charlotte and asked her to stay on the phone with me while we sweated it out.
“Wait! Here it is!” Bob was watching an incoming text message. As he scrolled down, he started to read it to us. I held up my cell phone so Elizabeth could hear.
I couldn’t believe it. We had won.
They were going to take every last one of the families out of Hutto. The proposals for three new immigrant family detention centers would be canceled. The news would be in the morning edition of the New York Times.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I still didn’t believe it. Every time I woke up, I’d race to my computer to see if the Times story had been posted yet.
Sometime just before dawn on Thursday, August 6, it showed up on my screen.
The government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Texas, that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire . . .
The decision to stop sending families there—and to set aside plans for three new family detention centers—is the Obama administration’s clearest departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.
It was real. Finally, I could sleep.
Is the victory perfect? No. Hutto will still be used to house immigrant detainees without children. Many of the families that were taken out of Hutto were deported. Others are awaiting asylum hearings that could result in their deportation. Every child, woman, and man who spent time at Hutto, and all those who are in other immigrant detention centers across the United States, will continue to suffer from the effects of, as the New York Times put it in an editorial on September 20, 2009, “ . . . the desperate reality: the brutal mistreatment; isolation, filth and deprivation; the shabby or non-existent health care.”
There is still much work to be done, particularly in rolling back immigrant detention and deportation. Thirty-three thousand people are living in detention every day; more than four hundred thousand are deported every year.
Despite this reality, the importance of the victory at Hutto, and the withdrawal of the proposal to build three new immigrant family detention centers, should not be underrated. But it will only remain so if we keep raising the stakes, so that we continue moving forward, and make the price of going backwards simply too high to pay.