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Immigration officials give tour of much-maligned facility in Taylor.
By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
TAYLOR — The concertina wire is gone. So are the imposing steel doors in the booking area and the green and purple hospital-type scrubs issued to immigrants and their children. Also gone are the routine head counts by uniformed guards that awakened children in the middle of the night at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention center.
New are the privacy curtains around toilets in the cramped cells and glass-enclosed cubicles where immigrants can meet with their attorneys.
Federal immigration officials opened up the detention center to reporters Tuesday to showcase these and more than 100 other changes they say make the former medium-security prison more family-friendly. The changes have been implemented in the past year, many of them after a lawsuit was filed challenging the treatment of families at the controversial facility.
The 470-bed detention center, which opened in 2006, is one of two in the country that confine families on immigration violations while they await disposition of their cases. Officials say it is a humane way to keep families together while enforcing immigration law.
Last year, immigrant advocates sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, charging that conditions at the facility were inappropriate for families and children. As part of a court settlement, immigration officials in December implemented for the first time federal standards at detention centers for immigrant families.
"Candidly, when (Hutto) opened, we were new to the family residential facility business. We learned a lot," Gary Mead, acting director for detention and removal at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Tuesday.
Mead said the modifications — he estimated 110 in all — would have taken place even without the lawsuit.
Advocates like Michelle Brané of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children in New York disagree. They say the lawsuit, public pressure and media exposure of conditions at T. Don Hutto moved the immigration agency to take action.
Brané said she was "quite overwhelmed" by the changes she saw during a brief visit to the facility in February.
"There wasn't nearly the oppressive atmosphere that you felt before," Brané said.
jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635
