We coordinate a visitation program at the T. Don Hutto women's immigrant detention center in Taylor, TX.
If you would like to volunteer for the Hutto visitation program please contact Rocío Villalobos.
We are grateful to the Texas Bar Foundation for support of our visitation program.
If your congregation or community is concerned about incarceration, we can help you start thinking about a visitation program in your area. We’ll help you ask the right questions about the facilities that are in your locale and which enforcement agencies – municipal, county, federal or ICE – manage them. We’ll help you think through the resources you have as well as the training, permissions, and documentation you’ll need.
Grassroots Leadership offers training and counsel based on its successful Immigrant Detention Visitation Program at the T. Don Hutto facility in Texas, a program we manage in conjunction with the Social Justice Institute at the University of Texas and Texans United for Families.
We offer a comprehensive introduction to the private prison and detention center industry in this country, and an overview of immigration and criminal justice issues that create the burgeoning growth of incarceration and its impact on legislation.
Our training offers an introduction to criminal justice and immigration and detention terminology; an understanding of the process of arrest through incarceration or detention; the legal immigration process today; examples of prisoner visitation and support across the nation representing many different kinds of programming; an overview of the Women’s Campaign and a walk through our Hutto Visitation Program. You will decide whether or not you will begin a visitation or support program and how it will be built and resourced. We will help you in those first crucial steps.
If you are interested in helping initiate a program in your community, please contact us. In addition, we will be presenting regional trainings in 2012. Please watch this page for dates and locations.