Demonstrators call to Shut Hutto Down! : Houston Indymedia

Houston Sin Fronteras joined activists across the state to participate in the 12th demonstration against T. Don Hutto immigration detention facility in Taylor, Texas. The Hutto facility, owned by Corrections Corporation of America, is one of the only detention centers in the nation that detains children.

Protestors carrying signs that read “Free the Children,” “Toddlers are not Terrorists,” and “Shut Hutto Down” marched 1.5 miles from Heritage Park in Taylor to the Hutto detention facility. The march took activists through the mostly abandoned downtown, across railroad tracks, and through a neighborhood near the facility. We saw the facility when we reached the end of the Martin Luther King Memorial Drive.

It was a pretty incredible and terrible sight. The facility is huge and the first thing we saw was children playing on a little playground that was completely surrounded by barbed wire fences. Activists started chanting “free the children” and “ninos, escucha!, estamos en la lucha!” in hopes that some of the children could hear us. As we got closer to the facility, the children were taken back inside.

The rest of the demonstration was held in front of the facility. A big sign in the front reads “Don T. Hutto – Residential Center.”

“They say that it’s a family center, but it’s a prison,” said Sherry, a Georgetown resident who has been to every protest at the Hutto facility. She says most people don’t even know that children are being imprisoned in the facility.

Georgetown and Taylor are both in Williamson County. “We [the Williamson county residents] are paying to imprison innocent people,” Sherry said.

She’s been working with other Williamson County residents to put pressure on the county commissioners, who refuse to provide oversight at Hutto. The commissioners, according to Sherry, have been having secret meetings regarding their contract with CCA. She’s working to make whatever’s going on at these meetings to be public information.

A few other residents of Williamson County attended the protest, including representatives from the local LULAC chapter. Four members of Houston Sin Fronteras were there and the other attendees came from Austin and San Antonio.

Jeannette, a San Antonio resident, has been coming out regularly to the protests. During the June 23 protest, she learned that the children don’t have access to physical education and rarely get to go outside. She also learned that the Muslim detainees are being forced to eat pork, which is strictly against their religion. Jeannette wants the detainees to be freed. “They’re just immigrants coming here to work for a better life,” she said..

The monthly protests at Hutto are being mainly organized by a group called Free the Children. The group began having monthly rallies in order to “not let anyone forget that children are still in prison,” according to Antonio, a Free the Children organizer from San Antonio.

One of their goals has been to get community involvement from Taylor residents living near the detention facility. Two residents from a neighborhood facing the detention center participated in the rally on Saturday.

Margarita lives right around the corner from Hutto and thinks the facility is violating the human rights of its detainees. “Suposedly we’re going oversees to give liberty to other countries, but there’s no liberty here,” she said.

She’s especially disturbed by the detention of children and said she thought and she and her other neighbors should support the protests because Hutto is making children prisoners. “We are here protesting to free the children,” Margarita said.

The next protest at Hutto will be Saturday, September 29.