Texans Protest For-Profit Prisons On World Refugee Day
This year, Austinites will be celebrating World Refugee Day a little bit differently. In addition to welcoming new refugee communities, tonight Austin groups will be defending a future detained community. Fifteen Texas-based organizations and hundreds of concerned Texans alike will rally at the Capitol to protest the build of a new immigrant detention center in Karnes County, Texas.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) commissioned the GEO group to build and operate the Karnes Co. detention facility last December. GEO is a large, for-profit prison corporation and, despite tremendous outcry from the public, it began construction this March. According to ICE, the $32 million, 600-bed facility will be a model for future centers, as ICE claims the facility will be the first of its new “civil” detention system.
But many worry that calling this facility a “model” of “civility” is a misnomer to say the least. After all, GEO has been involved in several allegations over lack of medical attention and other civil rights violations. It has also faced several lawsuits for abuse and neglect. Even more alarmingly, the detention center will hold asylum-seekers and those without serious criminal convictions.
It is fitting, then, that Texans will rally tonight. While on World Refugee Day we commemorate those who have escaped persecution, Texans will demand that we also commend those who have not yet made their persecuted status official. Moreover, the protest has great timing, as it’s taking place at beginning of ICE’s supposed move towards only focusing on serious criminals.
Tonight is just one of many efforts to proclaim a system that detains those seeking asylum is not a “civil” system at all. Two of the fifteen Texas-based organizations against the build, Texans United For Families (TUFF) and Grassroots Leadership, have been most vocal in protesting the proposed facility.
Members of both organizations met with Karnes County Commission last December to testify against the build. They later sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, and put out a press release to shed light on the issues with GEO.
One of the most active members in the protest, Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership, said that both the Commission and ICE responded to these pleas by saying, “the facility [is] going to happen, GEO [will] be the contractor, and we should just work to make the facility a better place rather than protest its construction.”
But Libal and these organizations will not stop protesting. They launched a petition with Change.org in April to stop the facility’s ongoing construction. And Libal hopes that tonight, “hundreds of Texans will join us in both protesting the construction of this new detention center and the growth of Secure Communities, which has swept thousands of Texas immigrations into the detention and deportation process.”
The rally will begin at 11th and Congress at 7.00pm. The march will leave to 7: 30 p.m. and head to the Travis County Jail.
Follow Nicole Kreisberg on Twitter at @NicoKrei
[Photo By DIAC Images]