Protesting Prisons

With the breathtaking immigration protests commandeering the streets in dozens of U.S. cities yesterday, it may behoove us to look back and remember how quickly the reprehensible, anti-family House Resolution 4437, introduced by GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner (just in time for Christmas) on December 6, 2005 was followed by an announcement that Halliburton would build $385 million worth of new prisons to jail immigrants.

As much as any other factor, the threat of internment has put people into the streets. On Feb. 3, the New York Times reported …

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq.

KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, company executives said.

Later in the story comes this telling factoid …

In recent months, the Homeland Security Department has promised to increase bed space in its detention centers to hold thousands of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. In the first quarter of the 2006 fiscal year, nearly 60 percent of the illegal immigrants apprehended from countries other than Mexico were released on their own recognizance.

So, the United States is more likely to detain “illegal” Mexican immigrants than “illegal” immigrants from other countries. Thus, if were detaining just 40 percent of Other than Mexicans, it’s safe to assume that we’re detaining a higher percentage Mexicans before deportation – perhaps half or more. Therefore, these Halliburton detention centers are clearly meant to jail mostly Mexicans, the very people out in force on American streets yesterday with kids and grandkids, waving Old Glory.

Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the new contract was another indication that the government planned to expand the detention of illegal immigrants, including those seeking asylum.

"It's pretty obvious that the intent of the government is to detain more and more people and to expedite their removal," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

Hand in hand, the GOP and their corporate overlords have stupidly driven millions of hard-working family-oriented Mexicans and other Latinos and Hispanics into the streets to demand their unalienable rights as people to live free in the United States.

These newly minted Americans demand to be free people, not felons or detainees or members of a guest worker class to be exploited and barred from voting. This courageous stand for dignity and justice is played out in the shadow of looming Halliburton/GOP prisons where indefinite Guantanamo-style detention awaits “illegals” and their kids.

Progressive native-born Americans should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these new Americans, in the grille of the GOP and the xenophobes. Where are the Democratic politicians?

Is this the new wave of radical-left Latin American politics coming up from Venezuela, from Peru, from Mexico? Is the domino theory correct? Is the United States the next country to fall? The GOP sure seems to be paving the way for some radical, New Deal-type renegotiation of the social order with their threat of Halliburton prisons for these Mexican-American families.