Posted on Wed, Aug. 12, 2009

Detained immigrant families will soon leave former Central Texas prison, government says
By ANABELLE GARAY


DALLAS — Detained immigrant children and their families are expected to be out of a former Central Texas prison within a few months, the Homeland Security Department’s special adviser on detention said Wednesday.

Although the government is giving itself until the end of the year to stop using the T. Don Hutto facility in Taylor to hold families, Dora Schriro told The Associated Press that she expects the men, women and children there to be deported or released under supervision sooner.

Hutto had 127 men, women and children as of last week, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility.

Schriro said she expects that in the next few months, families in the facility will "be removed or have received relief and be out in the community." She said some families could be assigned to "alternative detention."

The move is part of a plan by Homeland Security to modify detention policies by placing monitors at large detention centers, hiring a medical expert to review healthcare, naming Schriro to the new position of director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning, and other changes. Although families are no longer being sent to Hutto, the government will still hold families at the Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania.

Immigration officials say Hutto tries to keep families together while they seek asylum, await deportation or seek other outcomes to their immigration cases. No immigrants detained at Hutto are criminals; many are asylum-seekers from Latin America and Iraq.

Critics say the facility is a former prison run by a for-profit private corrections company. Children live in tiny cells furnished with bunk beds and a steel toilet. Many of the Hutto detainees have complained of guards disciplining children by threatening to separate them.

Advocates sued the government and reached a settlement that required ICE to ease the harshness of the facility. It called for changes that include installation of privacy curtains around toilets in the cells, a full-time pediatrician and elimination of a counting system that required families to be in their cells for hours a day.


http://www.star-telegram.com/state_news ... 35242.html