Anchor Intro
Among the biggest issues the nation faces is undocumented immigration policy. Texas holds over 1.6 million undocumented people, only second to California. But where do the many illegal immigrant detainees end up? Marlon Saucedo reports of an obscure Texas town detention center that exclusively holds over 500 women and children and was the location for a protest held against it.
First Reporter Track
*sound clip of bus (20 seconds)
Me: We began our two hour road trip inside of a bus towards a protest that was organized by members of Grassroots Leadership, Texans United for Families and the University Leadership Initiative against the detainment of immigrant children and women in Karnes Detention center, run by private prison corporation, GEO. The bus was filled very diverse and excited voices which were in contrast with the gloomy weather that Austin experienced, among those voices was former president of the ULI, Deborah Alemu, who was in opposition with the conditions of the detention center. *
*sound clip of Deborah (5 seconds)
Deborah: They have absolutely no freedom to leave as they wish and we think that is a violation of human rights.
Me: Once at the isolated detention center, it didn’t take long before the riled up people armed with signs joined other members from San Antonio and Dallas. *
*sound clip of chanting (5-8 seconds)
Me: The protestors held skits and they sang while, a smaller group of people made attempts to send letters from family members to detainees by handing them to children, but their efforts were denied. With megaphones, the protest leaders gave their emotional accounts of what it was like to have been inside of these detention centers, Elaine Chodron, member of Grassroots Leadership, claimed that even through workers of the centers bragged of refrigerators being stocked with food, the children within were suffering of malnutrition.*
sound clip of a leader, Elaine Chodron (14 seconds)
Elaine: They are not getting fed enough and you have to know that GEO is taxing the U.S. Taxpayers 160 dollars a day to keep people in here while the quality of food is just really insufficient.
Me: On the note of malnutrition, UT sociology professor, Nestor Rodriguez believed it to be just another component that detention centers needed to improve on, among others like better supervision and criteria suited for migrants. When it came to the influence that the acts of protest held, Rodriguez believed it was an important act for policy makers.*
*sound clip of Nestor Rodriguez (13 secs)
Nestor: … Important for the government and the private contractors who run the detention centers to understand that there’s concern from the public. That the public’s not ignorant about this.
Me: The entire event was mostly organized by Cristina Parker. Once a journalism student in UT, she later took an interest in the Grassroots movement and enjoyed the activist aspects of it. Explaining the roots of the organization, she revealed privatization as an entity that rolled back the progress of the civil rights movement and is now a clear focus in their activism.
*sound clip of Cristina Parker (10 seconds)
Cristina: This idea that the government would contract out to incarcerate people for corporations that would make billions of dollars off of it and then turn around and use those billions of dollars to lobby for harsher laws, for new laws to lock up more people
Private prisons are making so much money and in fact, really their cash cow is immigrant detention and that immigration family detention makes it all the more worse.
Me: Seems like only the start of an uphill battle against private prisons within Texas as a new detention center will open up in Dilley, one very similar to Karnes but this one is estimated to be the largest in the nation. But the activists are hopeful and they plan on creating the same type of action there and reach their ultimate goal at stopping these centers at once. Marlon Saucedo, J302.
Marlon C.S. 