Private prison company sued in death of migrant child, 1
Source: Associated Press
Nomaan Merchant, Associated Press
Updated 4:10 pm CDT, Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP
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HOLD FOR STORY - FILE - In this July 10, 2019, file photo, Yazmin Juarez, is sworn in by a photo of her holding her daughter Mariee, 1, who died after being released from detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), at the start of a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on treatment of immigrant children at the southern border on Capitol Hill in Washington. Juárez, the mother of a 1-year-old daughter who died weeks after being released from immigration detention center, is suing the private prison company that operates the facility. Lawyers for Yazmin Juarez filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday, July 31, 2019, against the company CoreCivic.
HOUSTON (AP) — A woman whose 1-year-old daughter died weeks after they were released from an immigration detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the private prison company that operates the facility.
Lawyers for Yazmin Juárez are demanding $40 million from CoreCivic in the complaint filed in federal court in San Antonio. It's the third legal claim they have filed related to the death of Yazmin's daughter, Mariee, in May last year.
The deaths of children detained by border agents have drawn national attention as have the conditions in border facilities where in some cases dozens of children have been held together at a time. Yazmin Juárez testified on July 10 before a U.S. House panel as photos of Mariee were displayed on television screens. Some lawmakers wiped away tears as she spoke.
CoreCivic operates the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement family detention center at Dilley, Texas, the largest facility of its kind. Juárez's lawyers say CoreCivic allowed poor conditions to fester at the 2,400-bed facility.
"We don't believe that it's ever appropriate to jail small children," said Stanton Jones, a lawyer for Juárez. "At a minimum, if CoreCivic is making huge amounts of money to run a jail for children, there are legal duties that come with that."
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Private-prison-company-sued-in-death-of-migrant-14270534.php
What I Saw at the Dilley, Texas, Immigrant Detention Center
The stories I heard from the women and children trapped in Trump’s willfully cruel immigration system will stay with me forever.
By Martin Garbus MARCH 26, 2019
A prison for refugees: Inmates at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, May 2015. (The New York Times / Redux / Ilana Panich-Linsman)
When I first started to write this, I was crying. I was flying back from Dilley, Texas, the site of the largest family-detention center in the United States. It is 75 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. The center is actually a prison—an internment camp. I see the faces and hear the voices of the women and children I just left.
Nearly every woman I saw seeking asylum came from the northern triangle of Central America: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. They had come, primarily, not to save their own lives, not even to save themselves from hopeless poverty or endless physical and sexual abuse, but to save their daughters and sons. The mothers believed their children, who were facing sexual abuse, rape, violence, and possibly murder in their native countries, would be safer in the United States. In most cases the events that caused them to leave, a month or so before I saw them, were attempted or successful attacks by predators, primarily against their daughters, either made by gangs, the government, members of their own families, or unknown men.
Journalists and politicians are often barred from coming in to the detention centers. Occasionally, the center owners will permit guided visits. They do all they can to mislead. I and others had the benefit of being there day after day.
I spent one week at Dilley, leaving early in February, as a volunteer lawyer to help these families with their asylum applications. Nearly every one of the almost 500 people that I saw in the detention center was sick. There were, at the end of my visit, 15 infants in the center—two children had previously died in government custody, though not in the Dilley facility. The children and their mothers, most of whom had crossed the Rio Grande ten days before, near McAllen, Texas, often bucking strong currents and sand holes, where the water level hovered around their knees, looked for border patrol agents so they could be taken into custody and request asylum.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/dilley-texas-immigration-detention/
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