Immigrant Detention and Human Rights

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Immigrant Detention & Human Rights Project

The immigrant detention system in the United States has seen unprecedented growth in the past 10 years. Amongst those affected by detention expansion are society's most vulnerable. Immigrant families are ripped apart when a long-time resident parent is detained for long periods of time. Asylum seekers are incarcerated for months or years while their cases are resolved by an unwieldy immigration court system. Children are psychologically traumatized while incarcerated in the T. Don Hutto prison. Communities are terrorized by immigration raids and detainments of community members.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the boom in federal detention expansion have been for-profit private prison corporations. All of the recently built or proposed prison beds are operated by private prison companies. Private prison corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group are seeing an exponential growth in business and stock prices, even as horror stories from their inadequate facilities continue to stream into the public.

In July 2003, with the aid of the Ford Foundation, we opened an office in Austin. Our Texas organizers led a three-year campaign in Laredo to block what would have been the U.S.’s largest for-profit private detention center holding immigrants being prosecuted for entering the country. In 2007, we forced the U.S Marshals Service to cut the size of the facility in half.

In early 2008, a community-based campaign blocked the construction of a 1,500-bed immigrant detention center in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina being aggressively pushed by U.S. Representative Sue Myrick, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. When ICE attempted to build the same immigrant detention center in neighboring Gaston County, we stopped that effort as well.

Immigrant Detention Resources and Reports

GROUND ZERO: The Laredo Superjail and the No Action Alternative, Nicholas Hudson, July 2006

Careless Detention - Medical Care in Immigrant Prisons, The Washington Post, May 11, 2008, four day series by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein.

Federal Report Recommends Improvements in Reporting Deaths of Immigrant Detainees, The New York Times, July 3, 200, by Nina Bernstein.

Dying in Detention, Editorial, The New York Times, June 11, 2008.

Immigration agency plans new family detention centers, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2008, by Anna Gorman.

A lethal limbo for migrants, Lack of healthcare turns federal detention into a death sentence for some immigrants. Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008, by Sandra Hernandez

T. Don Hutto Family
Detention Facility

In August 2009,the Obama administration announce the end of family detention at Hutto.

The past three years have seen thousands of people participate in dozens of Hutto vigils, two great documentary films on family detention, major media scrutiny, a landmark lawsuit settlement, 60,000 petition-signers, and the organizing of students, immigrant rights advocates, faith activists, and everyday people around the country to end family detention.

Ending family detention at Hutto is not just a victory for Grassroots Leadership's Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, but for an entire movement for justice.

Hutto History - ICE held immigrant families at the T. Don Hutto family detention center. Before the successful legal action by the ACLU in the fall of 2007, children wore prison garb, and were denied adequate schooling, health care, and recreation. Despite some important improvements made as a result of community organizing, Hutto remained a medium security prison managed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a for-profit adult corrections company. Grassroots Leadership and other organizations and individual continued to protest the Incarceration of infants and children at Hutto -- even with the "privacy curtains around toilets" mandated in the ACLU settlement.