NOTES chapter, especially Mohamed Aly and Many people in Binghamton contributed to this challenging queries and suggestions by Rozann Greco. appreciate the thoughtful and Weldon Johnson Institute, which hosted the editors. 1 would also like to thank the James me during the writing of this piece. People and the Census; Wagner, “Phantoin 1. See AIlard and Muller, Incarcerated Clause’ Constituents in the Census”; Marantz, “The Five-Fifths 142. Obvious’ the “Restating Gilmore, and 2. Gilmore of Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas.” 3. See Camayd-Freixas, “Statement Economy of 1mmigration.’ 4. See Barry, “The New Political reading of this tendency in a puhlic Iecture at 5. Fran Ansley provided a critical Emory University in March 2009. Force.” 6. See Bhattacharjee, “Private Fists and Public “A Prison Is Not a Home Notesfrom the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention BOB LIBAL, LAUREN MARTIN, AND NICOLE PORTER While mainstream American history understands the internment of Japanese families during World War II as a lapse, a paranoid moment pardoned by the anxieties ofwar, the war on terror has exhumed and institutionalized these prac tices to round up a new group of supposed enemies: immigrant and asylum seeking families. Beginning in March 2001, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INs) began to hold families in a former nursing home in Berks County, Pennsylvania. In 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (IcE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHs), expanded family detention to the T. Don Hutto Correction Center in Taylor, Texas. Hutto was opened as part of the Secure Border Initiative, which combined new immigration enforcement policies with unprecedented leveis of funding, surveillance technology, fencing, and staifi Representative of the massive expansion of detention through SBI, Hutto multiplied ic’s family detention capacity sevenfold, from Berks County’s 84 beds to 592. Family detention only became institutionally necessary, how ever, because SBI also expanded the expedited removal program from its focus on Mexican citizens to include “other than Mexicans.” Immigration officers retain exclusive authority to place noncitizens in expedited removal, putting them in detention and deeming them deportable with no immigration court review. Calling it a shift from “catch and release” to “catch and return,” DHS’S Secure Border Initiative is based on a presumption of detention and deporta tion, with Iittle regard for the claims to asylum and immigration relief migrants BIBLIOGRAPHY and the Census. New York: Allard, Patricia, and Chris Muller. Incarcerated People Brennan Center Publications, 2005. Dollars and Sense, Barry; Tom. “The New Political Economy of Immigration’ January—February 2009. Race, Gender, and Bhattacharjee, Anannya. “Private Fists and Public Force: and Criminalization, Surveillance’ In Policing the National Body: Race, Gender Mass.: South Camhridge. Bhattacharjee and Jael Silliman, ‘—54. edited by Anannya End, 2002. xas, Federally Certified Camayd-Freixas, Erik. “Statement of Dr. Erik Camayd-Frei District oflowa Regarding Interpreter at the U.S. District Court for the Northern 7 Undocumented 9 of2 a Hearing on ‘The Arrest, Prosecution, and Conviction before the Subcommittee Workers in Postville, Iowa, from May 12 22, 2008: Securing and International Law:’ on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border http://judiciaryhouse.gov/heariflg5/Pdf/CamaYdFrxas080724.P “Restating the Ohvious’ In Indefensible Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, and Craig Gilmore. edited hy Michael Sorkin. Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, New York: Routledge, 2007. Count, and Use, Our Prisoners’ Marantz, Andrew. “The Five-Fifths Clause: How We Siate, November 6, 2006. Siate (November 6, zoo6). http://www.sIate.com/id/2152994.’ Census’ New York Times, September 26, Wagner, Peter. “Phantom Constituents in the 2005. mayhave. Immigration law grants ICE the authority to change immigration enforce ment procedures and practices, including who is detained where and for 253 .O1I. 254 • ‘k Prison 15 Not a Home” LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER Central how long. The majority of Hutto’s detainees are asylum seekers from been America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Iraq people who would not have de mandatory and removal detained without the SBI’S expansion of expedited ICE detained, tention. Working from the assumption that everyone must be prior to opened Hutto to reconcile two problems of its own creation. First, detention infrastructure SBI, families were exempted from detention (since the and ICE argued children), for consisted entirely of correctional facilities unfit to TCE, According that this “loophole” encouraged smugglers to “rent” children. he smugglers assumed that if they were apprehended with children, they could practice released under the pretense of being a family.’ No examples of such a provided been have law, criminal which would have been prosecutable under to date. and detain ICE’s initial solution was to separate parents from their children unnec them separately, which created the second probiem: public outrage over are who “Children ICE, told essary family separation. Congress, for example, ‘un fact not in apprehended by DHS while in the company of their parents are accompanied’; and iftheir welfare is not at issue. the [House Appropriations] such Committee expects DHS to release families or use alternatives to detention When possible. whenever as the Intensive Supervis{ion] Appearance Program ap detention of family units is necessary, the Committee directs DHS to use com 2 Unfortunately, these propriate detention space to house them together” and do not carry the force of Iaw bill ments were part of an appropriations “appropriate” ascribed to enacted legislation. ICE ignored Congress’s call for detention space and alternatives, a failure that has since haunted the agency. not supply enough federal detainees to make Hutto profitable. CCA planned to close the prison, and was saved only by a late night agreement with the U.S. Marshals to house adult male immigrant detainees. In 2006 this contract was amended to include a new group of inmates: families. Despite Hutto’s shift from a prison to an immigration detention center to a 1 . «1mi1y residential facility:’ CCA’s contracts stipulated no changes in the facil ity’s operating procedures. To CCA, one group of prisoners is like any other: they bring payments for bed space. Thus, a failing private prison corporation was saved by the expansion of migrant detention, which filled its half-empty prisons and provoked a building frenzy across rural West Texas to capitalize on the “expanding market” for immigrant detention. Thus, the for-profit prison model served as the basis for speculation on increased immigration enforce ment, a strategy investors evidently approved as CCA stock prices rose after 2003. By the fali of 2006, Hutto had come to represent the worst of a disturb ing trend throughout Texas: the speculation on and rapid construction of pri vately owned detention centers in remote locations, with little governmental oersight THE CAMPAIGN TO CLOSE HUTTO: MAKING DETENTION VISIBLE FROM PRISON TO “FAMILY RESIDENTIAL FACIUTY” since its The T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility (as it has been known prison built external sign was changed in 2006) is a former medium-security Once America. of Corporation Corrections for male prisoners in 1997 by the and railyard largest the the largest town in Williamson County and home to grain and cotton gins in Central Texas, Taylor was a vital hub of the cotton economy in the state. The automation of the railroads and the mechanizatiofl deregulation of agriculture reduced the need for manual labor in Taylor. The of family consolidation the of agricultural markets led to falling prices and long re a into farms into massive factory farms, which sent towns like Taylor cession in the 197os, 198os, and 199os. Despite the rapid growth ofWilhiamson away County’s technology sector, these investments were focused thirty miles million bring to s prison in Austin’s suburbs. Taylor’s officials expected the 255 to the local economy (though they neglected to explain how) and a significant increase in taxes paid to the Taylor Independent School District. Hutto opened ini995 with contracts to house prisoners from Oregon and Texas, and eventu ally became a federal pretrial detention center. By 2003, CCA’s contracts did — . • F Hutto reopened as a family detention center rather quietly in May 2006, adver tised by a single ICE press release. Alarmed by the drastic increase in detention throughout Texas, organizers against for-profit incarceration and immigrant nghts advocates began meetlng to discuss the issue in September 2006 iNs Detention Working Group mcluded the ACLU of Texas; the Texas Civil Rights Project; Grassroots Leadership; the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition; and University of Texas professor Michele Deitch and faculty and staff of the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic. J Seeking to highlight the complex issues ofprison privatization, raids, deten tion and abuses of executive power the group decided to focus on Hutto and faniily detention policy. While the geographic proximity of Taylor to Austin played a major role in the decision to focus on Hutto, so too did the sympathetic population targeted by family detention policy. Many organizers viewed Hutto and family detention as an entry point into the larger, and admittedly more 256 • ‘t Prison Is Not a Home” LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER ORGAMZING AGANST FAMILY DETENTION: A FOUR-TIERED STRATEGY Utilizing the diverse skills of its members, the Detention Working Group, which later became known as Texans United for Families (TUFF), developed a four-tiered campaign strategy: litigation, grassroots organizing, media advo cacy, and legislative advocacy. Litigation As local organizers protested outside Hutto, attorneys were shocked by what they found inside. Detained mothers reported appalling conditions to their attorneys: My daughters and 1 share a small cell. We ali have to use the toilet in front of each other and right next to our beds. [My daughtersl are forced to wear They wear the same clothes ali day, including to sleep and to prison clothes. 4 recreation. They wake us at 5:45 or 5:30 a.m. And at 6 a.m. we have to have finished bath ing ourselves. After that we have to eat in ao minutes, then return to the pod to do nothing. they don’t allow us to sleep, only to sit and wait for the hours, days, 5 months to pass. . . We have lost our religion in here. Our religion requires that we pray at certain times of the day, but we have to go to rec[reation] or chow at each of those times. The guards rush my children through meals. When Bahja was having problems with another giri at rec time, the guards and our social worker toid me that they 6 would take my children away from me if 1 could not control them. At Hutto it is difficult for me to take care of Sherona the way a mother should. The 7 family here is destroyed. We live in a prison. It is a prison. There is no freedom. 257 When you’re in Hutto, you feel like [you’re in] prison, you are a criminal, that you did something bad, that people are after you, they put you in these ciothes. These guards they treat you like you are in prison.K compiicated, issues of detention and deportation. Others were angered by the incarceration of innocent children. However, the group worried that focusing on children’s innocence impiied that the other thirty-three thousand detained adults were criminals, a strategy that might have silericed deeper questions about criminalization, racism, and militarization. While closing Hutto was the working group’s centrai campaign, organizers developed a broader message that identified problems that piague the immigration detention system gener ally: the rights of asylum seekers, the lack of enforceable standards and inde pendent oversight, long and indefinite detention periods, and ic’s continued 3 refusal to use nonpenal alternatives to detention. . • j fr Conditions at 1-lutto violated nearly every right granted to children in ICE custody by Fiores v. Reno, a 1997 settlement that stipulated immigration pro cedures and conditions of custody for ail minors in INS (now ICE) custody. Family detention did not enter into the imaginations of either the federal government or children’s advocates at that time, indicating the twenty-first century novelty of detaining families in the United States. As attorneys learned more, they found that CCA had not altered its operating procedures when it transitioned to a “family residential facility:’ The same tactics of intimidation and surveillance familiar to critics of the prison-industrial compiex were daily practices at Hutto. Automatic doors and iaser-monitored doorways prevented fmilies from moving freely around the faciity and piaced small children in danger. CCA’s use of prison-style headcount procedures required families to remain in their ceiis during counts, which confined them to their rooms for eleven to twelve hours a day. In February 2007, Michelle Bran of the international human rights orga nization Womens Refugee Commission published a detailed report on family detention at Hutto and Berks, which drew international media attention. 9 In March, the ACLU, the University of Texas Immigration Law Ciinic, and a pri vate law firm sued the Department of Homeland Security for the release of twenty-six children detained in Hutto. Arguing that the conditions at Hutto caused irreparable harm to detained chiidren and that the Fiores settlement stated that both release and family unity should be ICE policy, the attorneys sought to ciose Hutto by showing that it was grossly out of compiiance with existing law. Unfortunately, the judge refused to interfere with ICE’s ability to detain the plaintiffs’ parents, and the parties settled for improvements to conditions. The stipulations of the settlement reveaied massive compiiance failures, ranging from inadequate education, medical care, and nutrition, to dangerous liv ing quarters for toddlers and infants, to lack of attorney-client confidentiai ity While the settiement required the creation of family residential standards, which ICE published in January 2008, these were non-binding guidance docu rnents that did not guarantee compiiance with Fiores; in any case, the settle ment expired in August 2009. Ultimately, ICE’S discretionary power to detain noncitizens, an authority granted by Congress and affirmed in numerous court decisions, came into conflict with existing iaws for children, and the compro mise was continued detention, aibeit under improved conditions. 258 • LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER ‘YtPrisonlsNotaHome” Grassroots Organizing Tucked away from large population centers or in warehouse districts, detention centers often are invisible both to the communities affected by immigration enforcement and to the wider American public. Organizers have often accused ICII ofpurposefully contracting with centers in remote locations to avoid scru tiny. And during the Hutto lawsuit, an anonymously leaked ICE memo stated that Hutto was not an ideal location for immigrant family detention precisely because of its close proximity to “immigrant legal services” and “Austin’s em powered immigrant rights community.”° Seeking to highlight the presence of detention centers in Central Texas, the Detention Working Group organized a vigil outside Hutto in December 2o06. The event captured the attention of activists around the state, and “border am bassador” Jay Johnson-Castro led a three-day walk from the Texas capital to Taylor. The vigil brought out nearly a hundred protesters. The resulting me 11 dia coverage proved that family detention captured public attention, and there were near-monthly vigiis for the next year and a half. A coalition of existing groups converged around the issue, forming the Austin-based Texans United for Families, which shared the grassroots organizing efforts with the Texas Indigenous Council (from San Antonio), Free the Children, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and a growing group of Williamson County residents calling themselves the WillCo Family Justice Alliance. When ICE requested proposais for three new family detention centers in June 2008, activists with Grassroots Leadership, TUFF, and other organizations recognized the need to broaden the campaign’s focus from Hutto to the na tionwide policy of family detention. This led Grassroots Leadership to start a national campaign against family detention in early 2009. Beginning with «100 Events in 100 Days’ Grassroots Leadership and TUFF collected fifty-five thou sand petition signatures, organized toy and book drives, screened documenta ries, performed radio interviews, and reached out to faith-based organizations. Grassroots efforts continue to focus on pressuring Congress and Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to mandate the use of noncarceral options for families, a policy change that does not require major legislation and would have wide support from pro-immigrant and pro-family groups alike. Media Advocacy While media coverage was initially limited to stories in the Iocal and alternative press (such as the Austin American-StateSmafl, Taylor Daily Press, Democracy Now!, and CounterPunch), the ongoing vigiis at Hutto, a grassroots media cam [ [ :J 1 259 paign, litigation, and authoritative reports brought the issue to a broade r media audience. Democracy Now! was one of the first national media outlets to cover Hutto with its story about a nine-year-old detained Canadian in Februa ry oo In the subsequent 2 . 7 eighteen months, the story of family detention was covered on National Public Radio and in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. The lawsuit created regular opportunities for legal and academic experts to describe the indignities of family detention to a wide audience. These reports offered critical authoritative support to the passion ate arguments of advocates and activists, whose continuing vigiis created a social change narrative utilized by many media sources. Each brought attentio n to the other, a synergy that worked to keep family detention in the national spotlig ht for months. The grassroots media strategy has utiized email lists, print, web media (in clucling La Nueva Raza and the Texas Civil Rights Review), and fiim. The T. Don Hutto blog proved vital to publicizing vigils, providing photos and videos of events, and consolidating information for journalists covering family de tention. In 2007, filmmakers Matt Gossage and Lily Keber produced Hutto: America’s Family Prison. Running seventeen minutes, the fihn has been highly effective in two senses. First, it raises an immediate awareness about family detention; and second, it usually provokes a wider discussion ofmigrant deten ilon, prison privatization, and their interconnections. To facilitate Grassr oots Leaderships national campaign, TUFF developed a DVD toolkit that included the fiim and Hutto-related videos, documents, and pictures. The toolkit was distributed at conferences and to allies across the country. During the spring of 2009, Austin’s South by Southwest fiim festival screened the world premie re of Tie Least of These, a feature-length documentary about the ACLU’S lawsui t against ICE. Shown at international fiim festivais and most import ant to an audience of congresspeople in Washington, D.C., The Least of These drew attention to the August 2009 expiration of the lawsuit settlement and raised awareness at a national level. Since the Hutto lawsuit settled in August 2007, ICE has been more ag gressive in its public response to crjticism, inviting the League of United Latin American Citizens and some media representatives on tours of Hutto. In 2008, ICE began to insist that changes occurred before the law suit was settled and that because of this, the settlement was redund ant and unneCessary. In response, our message shifted to emphasize a few key points: — -1 • 1. — Hutto was stiil a restrictive faciIity Both Flores v. Reno and Congress mandate that children be held in the least restrictive ttna 260 • sible. In the federal magistrate’s final report on ic’s compliance with the Hutto settlement, the judge questioned the suitability of a former prison as a family facility and noted that, even with drastically improved conditions, Hutto never fully complied with Fiores or the settlement itself. 2. ‘APrisonlsNotaHome” LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER Alternatives to incarceration exist. The Vera Institute pioted a supervision program in which 93 percent of immigrants in proceed ings appeared for their court dates. The prograni combined legal, employment, housing» and social support, demonstrating that high rates of court appearance can he achieved without detention, at a much Iower cost, and without sacrificing the rights of noncitizens to due process. 3. There is no clear regulatory framework for family detention. The Hutto settlement expired jo August 2009, leaving only the Family Residential Standards as guidance documents for ICE oversight. Since they are based on aduit corrections and detention standards, the Family Residential Standards ensure neither “home-like” facili ties nor compliance with Fiores, which remains the overarching legal framework for ICE custody of children. Facilitated largely by TUFF, these arguments have been publicized through let ters to the editor and op-eds, a national sign-on letter, a petition, statements from faith communities, press conferences, and radio appearances, ali ofwhich have been posted at the T Don Hutto blog. Advocates based in both Texas and Washington, D.C., have remained in fre quent contact since ioo6, but have not planned a Iong-term legislative strategy outside ofexisting immigration reform discussions. This was a major limitation of the campaign, but is being addressed through Grassroots Leadership’s na tional campaign, which seeks to raise the profile offamily detention in national policymaking discussions. During the 2008 Texas Democratic presidential pri mary, more than twenty-five precincts across five counties passed resolutions calling for non-penal alternatives to Hutto. Submitted by members of TUFF and other organizers living jo these districts, this strategy was an effort to join grassroots activism and electoral politics. While the resolution was not rati fied at the state Democratic convention and was not passed on to the national 261 Democratic convention, the resolutions raised political awareness of detention across Texas. In response to TUFF members’ ongoing advocacy, Texas state representative Rafael Anchia filed a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives call ing for the use of noncarceral alternatives in place of Hutto. By the end of the legislative session in 2009, thirteen state representatives supported the resolu tion. Due to ao agreement to table ali immigration-related bills and resolu tions, HCR95 did not receive a hearing, but it did serve as ao organizing tool for anti-Hutto activists at the state capital. Finally, as Barack Obama’s admin istration has taken office, national-level immigrant rights advocates have now placed detention reform, including family detention, at the center of Homeland Security policy and immigration reform discussions. CONCLUSION While family detention is a relatively new policy, the biggest obstacle to or ganizing public support has been the question: What’s the alternative? In the political climate of enforcement-Ied immigration policy, the fact that families have never before been detamed in such numbers has failed to be a convincing argument for ending the practice. The American public has become incapable, it seems, of understanding immigration outside of a crime-and-punishment framework. Origmally, TUFF materiais included information on ICE’S Intensive Supervision Appearance Program as a desired alternative to family detention. Based on the Texas advocates’ Iack of experience with ISAP no such program has been implemented in the state this decision took a cue from DHS ma teriais and from other immigrant rights advocates. In working with organiz ers with direct experience of ISAP, such as the New York—based Families for Freedom, however, these alternatives have proven more restrictive than their early advocates in the immigrant rights community expected. The programs use ankle bracelets, random visits from ICE, and curfews to restrict the mobiity of migrants. Ankle bracelets require two hours to charge each day, are cumber some and often painful to wear, and stigmatize the migrant since many people assume that the wearer is on parole for criminal activity. In addition to their frequent interruptions of daily life, “alternatives to detention” work more like new forms of detention than true alternatives. Furthermore, these programs have been used more often to surveil people who would otherwise be ineligible for detention. Rather thao operating as ao alternative to detention, they operate iii addition to detention and allow ICE to surveil more people than ever before. — — Legislative Advocacy • 262 • ‘4 Prison Is Not a Home” LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER The emergence of these mixed reports has forced us to remove the references to ISAP and replace them with calls for nonrestrictive, noncarceral, and non penal alternatives to detention, though we have refrained from naming specific programs. Texas remains home to the majority of U.S. for-profit immigrant deten tion centers, an outgrowth of twenty years of prison privatization in the state. Repurposing failing prisons like Hutto and speculating on the rise in detention demand from programs like Operation Streamline and Secure Communities, migrant detention has been a boon to the private prison industry. Fortunately, the movement to close Hutto and to fight private detention corporations has spawned protests at other detention centers across the state. Before Hutto opened, these protests were small and sporadic. Today, they are better con nected, more visible, and have a more cohesive criticism ofenforcement, priva tization, and the impact of detention on human rights. Groups such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations, Amnesty International, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and others have visited detention centers in Texas, including but not limited to Hutto, making the issue ofdeten tion more prominent in immigrant rights and human rights circles. As mentioned above, focusing on family detention has also focused on the noncriminality of children, on the unfair punishment of children for their par ents’ actions. These arguments worked to bring new people into the movement to close Hutto, but do not always translate into broader arguments against the detention of adults. The detention of children, in particular, has captured the public imagination in ways that a decade of mandatory immigration deten tion did not. It has become clear that focusing on family detention is a power ful strategy for publicizing both migrant detention and family separation in general. The strategy carries Iong-term risks for the broader anti-detention and anti-prison movements, however. On the one hand, arguing that children should not be detained because they are not criminals can imply, first, that detention and imprisonment are legitimate punishments for crimes, and, sec ond, that adults are criminals. But on the other hand, arguing that children have the right to family unity and a stable childhood provides a powerful case against the deportation of undocumented parents. As more and more children find themselves in “mixed-status” households, with parents and other relatives facing deportation, the trauma of detention and deportation is in danger of becoming an epidemic. Family unity remains, however, ICE’s core justification for detaining families. Advocating on the basis of collective rights for families has allowed us to demonstrate the inconsistencies in immigration enforcement and to build stronger linkages to other grassroots organizing efforts. As the • 263 country continues to await immigration reform, rolling back ICE’S enforce ment system rests on the power of coalition building, creative organizing, and critical resistance. EPILOGUE On August 6, 2009, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility would no longer house families. As the New York Times wrote, “Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s tough approach to immigration enforcement when it opened fl 2006. The decision to stop sending families there and to set aside plans for three new family detenfion centers is the Obama administration’s clearest departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.” In essence, the government admitted what activists had been saying for years: Hutto was wholly inappro priate for detaining families. Over the following weeks, media outlets, includ ing the Washington Post and the Economjst, covered the policy changes at “the infamous” T. Don Hutto. Clearly something had changed. In the months leading up the announce ment, we had gained momentum in ali four areas of our strategy In the “First 100 Days Campaign” we argued that closing Hutto and ending family detention was an easy way for the Obama administration to diiferentiate itself from the Bush administration. The Least of These highlighted the impact of the lawsuit on conditions at Hutto and drew attention to the impending expiration of the settlement. The federal court’s final inspection report stated that, even though “use of [HuttoJ as a family detention center may not violate the Settlement Agreement [thatj does not mean that doing so is good public policy... it seems fundamentally wrong to house children and their non-criminal par ents this way. We can do better” (In re Hutto Family Detention Center, “Report to Parties of Final Periodic Review of Facility:’ case no. A-07-CA-164-ss). In Williamson Count-y residents pressed the County Commissioners’ Court to end ks contract with CCA, and met with significantly less resistance than in the past. Immigration detention as a whole continues to be under attack from im migrant rights advocates, and the Obama administration’s appointed special investigator, Dora Schriro, has critically evaluated the state of the detention system. Washington-based advocates met with her repeatedly in the months leading up to the announcement and pushed hard for the release of families — — . 264 • LIBAL, MARTIN, AND PORTER ‘4 Prison 15 Not a Home” from detention. It is hard to measure which aspect had the most impact, but we know that three years of grassroots organizing, litigation, media advocacy, and legislative efforts have paid off. So what now? ICE released some families from Hutto and transferred the rest to the Berks County Family Care Shelter. Whiie the policy change reduced family bed space by 75 percent, returning family detention to pre-9/11 leveis, ICE director John Morton has continued to assert that ICE will not end fam ily detention as a policy. In addition, Hutto has remained open and now de tains women without children, ieaving some activists to question the extent of the “change” and whether it’s a victory at ali. ICE’S announcement of Hutto’s changes preceded a broad description of a reorganization of the entire deten tion system. II is difficuit to teil, at this point, whether this will truly make detention more humane, or whether it wiii expand the detention system as a whole. Combining these multipie iayers ofadvocacy arguably made Hutto the most controversial detention center in the United States. Linking a specific deten tion center to a recent poiicy change the expansion of famiiy detention al iowed us to form both a focused and a multifaceted campaign centered around humanizing those in detention. This strategy allowed us to repeat the mes sage “End family detention at Hutto” in numerous Locations and media outlets. As we take our strategy to the next Texas detention center, we look for ward to retooling for the bigger fight: ending migrant detention in the United States. — Department of Homeland Security, “DHS Cioses Loophole’ House Committee on Appropriations, Departfrnent of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, 2006. While the authors of this chapter are members of Texans United for Famiies, we recognize that Hutto has catalyzed a diverse opposition. The following portions of the text outiine TUFF’s organizing strategy; but readers should note that groups in San Antonio, Dafias, Houston, and the Rio Grande ValIey have been very active and have organized around a variety of messages. Please see www.tdonhutto.blogspot.com for a complete archive of the organizing against Hutto. Second Deciaration of Rasa Bunikiene, in Saule Bunikyte v. Michael Chertoff Julie Myers, John Torres, Marc Moore, Gary Mead, Simona Colon, and John Pogash. March i8, 2007. http://wwwaciu.org/immigrants/detention/315o4igl2oo7o826.htmi. 1. 2. . . 826.htmi. /detention/315o4ig1200 o 7 6. Second Deciaratjon of Deka Warsame, in Mohammed Ibrahim, Bahja Ibrahim, and Aisha Ibrahim v. Michael Chertoff Julie Myers, John Torres, Marc Moore, Gary Mead, Simona Colon, and John Pogash. March i8, 2007. http://www.aclu.org/immigrank o826.htmi. 7 Idetention/315o41gi200 7. Declaratjon of Delourdes Verdieu, in Sherona Verdieu v. Michael Chertoff Julie Myers, John Torres, Marc Moore, Gary Mead, Simona Colon, and John Pogash. March 18, 2007. 70826 O igl 4 o 5 l 3 http://www.aclu.org/immigran/detentiofl/ O 2 8. Quoted in Keber and Gossage, Hutto: America’s Family Prison. 9. Women’s Refugee Commission, “Locking Up Family Vaiues.” 10. Barbara Hines, personal communication, March 2, 2009. 11. Johnson-Castro has led walks along the U.S.-Mexico border to protest the Secure Fence Act and other border securit-y measures. For more on his work, see Texas Civil Rights Review, “Our Hero Jay Johnson-Castro Walks Again.” 12. Democracy Now!, “1 Want to Be Free.” 13. State ofTexas, House Concurrent Resoiution 95. BIBLIOGRApHy — NOTES 265 5. Dedaration of Elsa Carbajal, in Richard Anderson Tome Carbajal and Angelina Juliet Tome Carbajal v. Michael Chertoff Julie Myers, John Torres, Marc Moore, Gary Mead Simona Colon, and John Pogash. March 1, 2007. http://www.aciu.org/immigrants — — • L Democracy Now! “‘1 Want to Be Free’: 9-Year-Old Canadian Citizen Pleads from Texas Immigration Jail’ February 23, 2007. http://www.democracynow.org. Department of Homeland Security «DHS Closes Loophoie by Expanding Expedited Removal to Alien Famiies: New Facility in Texas Opens Today for Illegal Alien Famiies.” May i6, 2006. wwwdhs.gov. House Committee on Appropriations. Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, 2006: Report Together with Additional Views (to Accompany U.R. 2360). lo9th Cong., 1st sess., 2005, H.R. 109-79. Keber, Lily, and Matt Gossage, dirs. Hutto: America’s Family Prison. http://tdonhutto .blogspot.com. State ofTexas. House Concurrent Resoiution http://wwwiegis.state.tx.us R&Bili=HcR 2 /BillLookup/Text.aspx?Legsess=8 95 Texas Civi Rights Review. “Our Hero Jay Johnson-Castro Walks Again.” http://www . 3 &sid=68 Women’s Refugee Commission. “Locking Up Family Values.” http://www .womenscommission.org/pdf/famdeten.pdf