Thread: TX: Immigrant advocates decry tent prison

Immigrant advocates decry tent prison
By FERNANDO DEL VALLE/Valley Morning Star
June 24, 2007 - 11:23PM
RAYMONDVILLE — Immigrant rights groups Sunday stood in front of a 2,000-bed federal detention center here, calling on the government to “Shut down tent city.â€

WELL HEY WHATEVER KIND OF DETENTION WE SEND THEM TO IT WILL BE BETTER THAN JAIL IN MEXICO. THE FOLLOWING I FOUND ABOUT JAIL IN MEXICO....AND THIS IS JAIL FOR KIDS. SO YOU KNOW ADULT JAIL IS HELL.

http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2003/inter ... post7.html



Mexico's Children Suffer in "Little Jails"
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 4, 2002; Page A01

MERIDA, Mexico -- The walls are 15 feet high and topped with jagged glass and barbed wire, ugly keepers of ugly secrets. For years they stood sentry over abuses of scores of children in state care, who were forced to eat pig food, beaten, even tied to trees for days at a time.

Beto, a homeless boy, was 10 years old when the police brought him here after they caught him stealing two shiny gold buttons from a store bin. He thought he might be going somewhere better than the street.

Instead, Betulio Chi Tzec spent the next five years behind the walls of the Yucatan state juvenile correctional facility, a little boy locked in a dormitory room with two teenagers convicted of rape.

Beto, as well as a teacher and a physician who worked there, said the woman who ran the youth detention home regularly beat the 50 children in her care. They said she kicked the children in the genitals, slapped them and sheared off their hair in fits of rage. Beto said she told the children, "You are all going to rot here," and he came to believe she was right.

According to youths who have spent time inside the system, as well as parents, government officials and many experts here, children are frequently mistreated, abused and forgotten in Mexico's "little jails," as the youth lockups are known. Officially called "schools for young offenders," many of these places are nothing more than cold prisons where classroom teaching is rare.

There are 4,200 children living in dozens of detention centers across Mexico. Conditions vary, and some centers are well run. But many operate the same way they did a century ago: out of public view and with little or no internal regulation or outside supervision. Parents are often barred from entering, though they are encouraged to slip money to guards to prevent harsher treatment of their children.

The Mexican government, battered by crime, has displayed little concern or tolerance for children who break the law. That indifference, as well as the secrecy that shrouds the detention centers, has perpetuated shoddy and often cruel practices, according to those with firsthand experience in the troubled system.

"These institutions are horrible," said Elena Azaola, a criminal justice specialist who has conducted studies of the juvenile centers. "The children live in misery."

Mexico relies on an informal and largely unregulated system of juvenile justice that has existed for decades. Children who break the law often have no access to an attorney. Administrative judges who handle juvenile cases set sentences, but there is often no judicial follow-up once children are sent to detention homes.

The real power is held by the directors of the centers. They effectively decide how long a child will be held and under what conditions. The directors are appointed by governors or other top officials in each of Mexico's 31 states.

"For children there is no system of justice. They are the victims of arbitrary decisions by those in charge," said Guillermo Alonso Angulo, a consultant for UNICEF in Yucatan state.

A system that abuses children and fails to punish the abusers is a legacy of the one-party rule that dominated Mexico for most of the 20th century. From 1929 until 2000, Mexico's presidents, and most of its governors, mayors, police and local officials -- including those in charge of youth programs -- belonged to the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

During that era, government jobs were dispensed more out of political loyalty than expertise. People running programs intended to benefit society often did little other than steal agency funds. Because of the party's hammerlock on power, they rarely had to answer to the public.

President Vicente Fox, who took office in 2000, has promised to create a new day for justice in Mexico. He has vowed that the law, not the personal or political whims of officials, will reign.

Now, the children locked away in detention centers are trying to hold him to his word.

Nearly every week recently, youths have climbed onto the roofs of their detention homes, setting fires and starting small riots to draw attention to their living conditions. When reporters arrive, the children yell over the wall that they have been beaten with brooms and belts.

On Oct. 2, in the western state of Nayarit, 37 children took over a detention center, throwing stones and screaming that they were "tired of the beatings." The day before, in the northern state of Sonora, 40 children brawled with their keepers, complaining about brutality. Similar uprisings have occurred in six other states and Mexico City this year, as angry children demand better treatment in their little jails.

Allegations of Cruelty

Mexico is struggling to transform itself into a nation where people feel protected -- not menaced -- by the law. Yet old ways prevail, as seen in the horrors of the Yucatan detention center.

The director, Maria del Rocio Martel Lopez, was a physician who had superb local political connections. Some who knew her recalled that she was tall, thin, blond and impeccably dressed.

Dozens of children under her care have now come forward to say she brutalized them. According to the findings of an investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, which issued a report in April, Martel presided for four years over an institution with "cruel and degrading treatment" of children, which included "denigrating punishments, humiliations, beatings and mistreatment."

Allegations of cruelty by Martel were reported to the governor's office as early as 1999. But the powerful, longtime governor who appointed her, Victor Cervera Pacheco, did nothing. Many here attribute his inaction to Martel's social and political standing; she is the widow of a former powerful party boss in the state.

A Merida radio station aired a report in 1999 about the allegations against Martel, but the reporter, Jose Luis Preciado, said he was pressured by state officials to drop the matter

Make it miserable for illegal aliens when they get caught (within some kind of Red Cross guidelines), they themselves will get the word out that it is not worth it to go to the US illegaly.

Let them experience that, and communicate it to their coherts, and illegal immigration will slow to a trickle.

You give them far to much credit for having common sense. Its obvious that they have dug in for the long haul and could care less that like their government WE DON'T WANT THEM EITHER. The fact that they have babies and use them as bargaining tools and have love and profess loyalty to a country where they are treated like feces gives you a sense of how pathetically low their self esteem and IQ's must be.

Make life in the US as an illegal alien much worse than it is for them in their home countries, then their going home becomes appealing. Treat them in a way that will direct their minds to produce in them the actions WE need, i.e. self-deportation. Find the line beyone which they will not go, find the level of life that they would not tolerate here and make them live it, then they will self-deport. They would have to have NO social benefits, not access to judicial process, no handouts, no work, etc. Remove the reasons that they come here and the comfort level they enjoy when the come and believe me, they will go home.

Remove the availability of renting a flat, opening a bank account, buying a car, getting a driver's license, getting medical care, food stamps, working...etc. and they will self-deport.

They come to the US because it is easier,safer, better for them to come here and make money. Remove the attraction and throw in some REAL unnatractive consequences of being illegal and you would hear a giant wooshing sound at the border.

But no one in the US has the political will to do this!

Oh yeah, and before they do go, they have to clean up all the trash at the border that they left.