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US Jails Canadian Boy

March 1, 2007 permalink

A Canadian boy, and nearly 200 other children, are in jail in Texas. In this case, the pretext is immigration. When children really need help, there are no child protectors in sight.

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We’ll Lock Up Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free

“I want to be free. I want to go outside, and I want to go to school,” pleaded a 9-year-old boy, on the phone from prison. This prison wasn’t in some far-off country, some dictatorship where one would expect children to be locked up. He is imprisoned in the United States.

The boy, Kevin, is imprisoned in Taylor, Texas, at the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility. His parents are also locked up there. The tale of how this family became imprisoned is just one example of how broken our immigration policies are in this country. It is a tale of children left behind, of family values locked up, of your tax dollars at work.

The parents are Iranian and spent 10 years in Canada seeking asylum. Kevin, their son, was born in Canada during that time. Their request for asylum was eventually denied, and they were deported back to Iran. Majid, the father, said he and his wife were jailed and tortured there. They soon fled to Turkey and bought Greek passports. They hoped to reapply for asylum in Canada, armed with proof of the torture they suffered in Iran.

On a plane back to Canada, a fellow passenger suffered a heart attack, requiring an unscheduled landing in Puerto Rico. Although they never had any intention of entering the U.S., because the plane touched down here, their passports were questioned and they were detained. The family was shipped off to Hutto. They have been there for more than three weeks.

Immigration detention places the family in a legal limbo that could leave them imprisoned indefinitely, perhaps only to be deported back to more torture in Iran.

This shameful practice of locking up children is bad enough. What’s worse is that it is being done for profit, by the Corrections Corp. of America. CCA is the largest publicly traded private prison operator in the U.S. CCA has close to 70 facilities scattered across the country, recent earnings of $1.33 billion and a gain in its stock-share price of 85 percent in the past year. Industry analysts gush at the profit potential promised by private prisons. Their commodity: human beings.

A recent report issued jointly by two nonprofit agencies—the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service—titled “Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families,” paints a grim picture of the conditions these families endure. While in 2005 Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain families in “non-penal, homelike environments,” the report details how prisonlike the Hutto facility is. While ICE announced Hutto as a new facility, it was formerly a prison.

Children as young as 6 are separated from their parents, kept in prison cells with heavy steel doors equipped with a sensitive laser alarm system. The children wear prison uniforms. They get one hour of school per day and one hour of recreation. All non-lawyer visits are “non-contact,” through a Plexiglas window speaking over a phone, to obviate the “necessity” of a full-body cavity search after each visit. Yet the chairman of the CCA board of directors, William Andrews, begs to differ: “The reports come from special-interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. ... The family facility, particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home.” Recent reports put the total number of children at Hutto at between 170 and 200.

Close to a year after massive pro-immigrant marches occurred in every major U.S. city, immigration policy remains broken, with sensational crackdowns on undocumented workers, a planned multibillion-dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and more than 26,000 immigrants in prison.

CCA stock is up but the spirits of 9-year-old Kevin are down as he languishes in his federally funded private prison cell. He wants to go home to Canada, where he was born. U.S. immigration officials now hold his fate and that of his parents: deportation to possible torture in Iran, or political asylum and a possible return to Canada. With a Congress obsessed with nonbinding resolutions and the Bush administration that brought you Abu Ghraib and the Maher Arar deportation scandal, the prospects for Kevin and his parents are grim at best.

Amy Goodman is host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

Source: Truthdig website

Addendum: Alex Jones calls this a concentration camp, since it holds people not for wrongdoing, but for being a member of a group.

Addendum: The boy Kevin and his family were returned to Canada on March 21. The camp remains in operation.

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Canadian boy, parents arrive in Toronto after Texas prison stay

A nine-year-old Canadian boy and his Iranian parents arrived safely in Toronto on Wednesday night after being held for six weeks in a Texas detention centre.

"Thank you for everybody who helped us," Kevin Yourdkhani said, clutching his bags at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.

Kevin Yourdkhani
Masomeh Alibegi holds up immigration papers as she walks with nine-year-old son Kevin Yourdkhani and his father Majid after arriving at a Toronto airport on Wednesday.Masomeh Alibegi holds up immigration papers as she walks with nine-year-old son Kevin Yourdkhani and his father Majid after arriving at a Toronto airport on Wednesday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

Kevin and his parents, Majid Yourdkhani and Masomeh Alibegi, flew into the airport from Houston, landing in Toronto at about 5:45 p.m. ET. The couple had tears in their eyes after leaving the plane.

The family was allowed to come to Canada after Immigration and Citizenship Minister Diane Finley agreed to give them temporary residency permits two weeks ago. The permits arrived in Texas on Monday.

Finley said she granted the permits in the best interest of the boy. The family is now trying to claim refugee status.

Kevin's parents arrived in Canada 10 years ago seeking asylum, but were unsuccessful and deported to Iran in December 2005. Kevin was born when they lived in Canada.

The parents said they faced torture in Iran and made another attempt to seek refuge in Canada with the use of stolen Greek passports.

But on a flight to Toronto from Guyana on Feb. 4, a passenger suffered a heart attack and died, resulting in the plane being diverted to Puerto Rico.

U.S. officials discovered their false documents and detained them for five days before sending them to the T. Don Hutto detention centre near Austin, Texas. The converted medium-security prison has been condemned by human rights groups and is the subject of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The family said living in the centre was awful.

"It was miserable condition they had over there," Majid Yourdkhani said, standing by his wife as he spoke to reporters at the Toronto airport.

"There are almost 200 children that live there in very bad conditions. Now most of the children there have chicken pox, eye infections, flu."

His wife said the family is relieved to be back in Canada, and young Kevin said he can now resume his life in Toronto.

"I will go back to my school, to my teachers," the boy said.

Source: CBC

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