Family detention centers

I was writing my silly little post below when I noticed a headline on one of my news feeds about families, including young children, being held in prisons on immigration charges.

It seems that the old method of releasing illegal immigrants between arrest and court was leading to too many missed court dates. So to prevent running, our government decided to imprison families. I mean, you can't just leave the kids alone in the apartment.

One such detention facility is a converted retirement home - more like a locked motel than a prison. But another one, the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Center in Texas, was, in fact, formerly a prison. Despite the extensive renovations agency officials claim to have made, illegal immigrants, again including children, are held in cells, the kinds with the toilets sitting in the corner, wearing scrubs-like uniforms and with severely limited amounts of recreational time and space. Children, from infants to teens, are allowed an hour of play time and an hour of English instruction a day. One pregnant Palestinian woman was denied Halal food and prenatal vitamins; she eventually stopped going to prenatal appointments because her five-hour absence (thanks to a 4-hour round trip drive) upset her children so much.

I understand that these people were behaving in an illegal manner and that they should neither go unnoticed or unpunished, but these people, the majority of whom came to America for the understandable desire of giving their children a better life than they had, are being treated like dangerous criminals. I cannot begin to imagine the work it will take for those imprisoned children to recover from this kind of emotional damage.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he plans to open more such prisons.

Maybe there were no good old days. Our country's history is studded with tragedy: slavery, genocide of the indigenous people, WWII internment camps. But we have advanced enough now to be ashamed of those tragedies - we know better, and yet we're imprisoning children?

The good old days that I long for is truly an ideal, what America could be if people stopped trying to bastardize the Constitution for their own personal gain. Yes, right now "people" is short-hand for President Bush but there have often been leaders and citizens who twisted the words to fit the situation - otherwise slavery could have never existed here.

The family prisons are not the disease but another symptom - along with budget cuts to veteran services, the Scooter Libby trial, pre-war lies and warrentless wire tapping. The disease is this administration.

This is not okay.