Breaking: Hutto Detainees Begin Hunger Strike
Immigrant women organize strike; demand liberation
By Amy Kamp, 5:10PM, Wed. Oct. 28, 2015
Grassroots Leadership announced today that a group of 27 women being held at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas, are beginning a hunger strike to protest the conditions at the facility and demand liberation.
The women, immigrants and refugees who are being held at the euphemistically named "center" – in practice, a for-profit prison – are likely to be deported. Until then, they are incarcerated in what they describe as abysmal conditions.
The women came up with the idea of the hunger strike themselves, then sent letters of demand to Grassroots Leadership announcing the strike and listing their reasons. One woman wrote, “I emigrated with the hope to obtain help here but instead I have been treated unjustly and have been here and detained for 6 months and in the end I have only been a victim of unfulfillment of the people in immigration and the judges, giving us hope with our credible fear finding in our cases just to have our cases finally be denied and condemned to a certain death.”
The entire set of letters can be read here.
Update: A rally supporting the women in their strike is scheduled to take place outside of the detention center today at 6:30pm today, Oct. 28. More info about the rally can be found here.
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