The Texas Gulag

Texas Prison Camp Future American Gulag?
Detention facility currently holds as many as 200 children incarcerated after midnight arrests
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet
Monday, January 8, 2007

A detention camp in Tyler Texas that currently holds hundreds of rebuffed asylum seekers who legally entered the country, half of which are children swept up in midnight raids, is a potential prime location for the enforced transfer of American citizens during a time of national emergency.

The privatized Hutto jail, which is also administered by Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S. on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal concentration camps.

In 2004 the facility was on the verge of being shutdown due to lack of occupancy but new immigration policies, allied to the burgeoning growth of the prison industry and future plans to detain American citizens on masse, have revived the potential scope of the camp, and a new contract to intern 600 individuals was finalized with immigration authorities in December 2005.

The facility is euphemistically called a "Residential Center," yet charges of overcrowding and poor conditions are rife, with an estimated 645 people filling a facility that has only 512 beds.

"Innocent children should not be jailed and forced to live under traumatizing and dehumanizing conditions," said a statement from Texans United for Families, an organization that recently held a vigil protest at the facility. "It is bad policy and an impractical and inhumane response to a growing refugee crisis. The U.S. should seek alternatives to detention while making sure that it legislates policies that support families and keep them together and out of jail."

Read the rest of it here, including a video about the facility.