Locked Up & Neglected, Immigrant Women Launch Hunger Strike in Texas
HAVANA TIMES – Last week, 27 immigrant women detained at the for-profit T. Don Hutto facility in Austin began refusing meals, demanding an end to mistreatment and their immediate release. Most are asylum seekers from Central America, which has seen a surge in migrants fleeing violence and abuse. The detainees said they’ve faced threats and unjustified surveillance as they languish in custody without hope of freedom.
Immigration officials have denied the hunger strike is even taking place. While exact figures are unknown, advocates say the hunger strike grew this week substantially, possibly into the hundreds. Hutto is run by the country’s largest private prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America.
The hunger strike is the latest by immigrant detainees around the country, following three others in the past month. “Women are fleeing Central America and Mexico because they are in danger,” says Cristina Parker, immigration projects coordinator for Grassroots Leadership. “We respond by putting them in a prison for profit that cuts corners, that serves bad food, that neglects people’s medical care and needs. This is the system that these women are exposing, and they’re doing so bravely.”
The great land of the free and the home of the brave which has exploited the natural resources of these countries, leaving their inhabitants illiterate and poor. They, because of the propaganda spewed out, run to the land of the free and the home of the brave seeking relief from their misery and this is the treatment meted out to them. The whole world is now looking and realizing the forked tongued policy of the great America, the bomber of Vietnamese children with napalm bombs, the silent onlooker as Israel, her partner in crimes against humanity, bomb schools, hospitals and synagogues in Palestine and the protector of Luis Posado the terrorist bomber of the Cubana Airline off the coast of Barbados in 1976. The great America has supported the worst of the worse dictators in the world and have the bold face, the nerve, the guts and the bareface to criticize others about human rghts abuses? Clean up your act America! These abuses do not exist in Cuba and China.
These women certainly were not Cuban. No one has the right to detain a Cuban so long as they have one foot on US soil per the Cuban Adjustment Act, better known as “wet foot, dry foot”.