Texas advocates hope Biden closes immigration center marred by sex-abuse allegations

AUSTIN — An immigrant advocacy group, Grassroots Leadership, has been trying for at least 10 years to get the federal government to close the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, where immigrant women seeking asylum are detained.

The group wants it closed, claiming there are inhumane conditions there including sexual abuse of detainees, inadequate food and medical care, and forced labor. Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials have long said that detention ensures the immigrants show up for hearings and that it has an aggressive inspection program to make sure detainees are safe in a humane environment.

A spokeswoman for Grassroots Leadership, as well as a University of Texas immigration expert, said that with President Joe Biden in office, they have new hope the center in Taylor might be closed.

“The president ran his campaign promising to really create a humane pathway for all people coming to the United States,” said Maria Reza, a spokeswoman for GrassRoots Leadership. “We want to put pressure on the Biden administration to actually follow through on his promise to give some dignity to all immigrants here living in the U.S.”

Denise Gilman, the co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said there several factors “coming together that make it possible to imagine that Hutto will be shut down; that all immigration detention centers will be shut down.”

One of those factors is that the number of people in immigrant detention facilities is low across the country, she said, partly because of court orders that urged detention centers to release people to protect their health during the coronavirus pandemic. The restrictive border policies that were in place during the Trump administration also did not allow the normal number of asylum seekers to come into the country, she said. The recent surge of children and teenagers requesting asylum at the Texas border should not affect the number of people in detention centers because unaccompanied children are held in licensed shelters and not ICE detention centers, she said. Another factor that Gilman said gives her hope is that Biden has announced he’s not going to renew contracts with private companies that run prisons and jails for people who have committed criminal offenses.

Biden hasn’t said much about immigration detention centers, but has talked about new policy directions that would consider immigration to be a normal process that benefits the country “so we don’t have to look at it from enforcement/ deportation and detainment lenses,” Gilman said.

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor holds women who have requested asylum when they reach the Mexico border. CoreCivic, a private company, has a contract with Immigration Customs and Enforcement to operate the facility.

CoreCivic and ICE did not respond this week to requests for information about how many women are currently held at the center. ICE signed a $260 million contract with CoreCivic in 2020 to operate the center for 10 years.

But immigrant advocates want it closed as soon as possible. The Detention Watch Center, a national coalition to abolish immigration detention in the U.S., announced this week a campaign to get Biden in his first year in administration to shut down 10 immigrant detention centers across the nation, including the one in Taylor. “Advocates have long documented widespread abuse at Hutto, including a serious pattern of sexual assault and harassment by facility guards,” a report by the network said.

This week, Grassroots and the University of Texas Law School Immigration Clinic released a report they co-authored called “Cruelty and Corruption: Contracting to Lock Up Immigrant Women for Profit at the Hutto Detention Center.”

The report alleges that women are abused at the center, including being given inadequate amounts of food, being forced to work and being sexually abused. It also alleges that the 10-year contract ICE signed with CoreCivic violates federal law. “The main immigration statute that authorizes contracting for detention space does not authorize direct agreements between the federal government and a private entity,” the report said.

ICE officials did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but a spokesperson said in an email that she was referring the report to the federal agency’s legal department.

Ryan Gustin, the manager of public affairs for CoreCivic, said in an email that “it’s unfortunate that critics attack the benefits we provide without themselves offering any solutions to the serious challenges our country faces on immigration.”

“It’s also unfortunate that a wholly unsubstantiated, anecdotal ‘report’ from a group whose sole purpose is to end our industry is taken at face value, while scores of official independent audits that demonstrate the quality of our services are ignored,” Gustin said.