Vol. 80/No. 38 October 10, 2016
Women seeking asylum go on hunger strikes
over detention
Thirty-two women and 36 children ranging in age from 2 to 16, who fled to the U.S. from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, are being held there. They are seeking asylum from gang and drug trafficking-related violence, domestic abuse and onerous conditions bred by the world crisis of capitalist production and trade on semicolonial peoples in Central America.
Their strike was launched to expose and protest lies by Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, who claimed the average time the women and their children spend in detention is 20 days or fewer. After they took a short break because of harassment by prison authorities, the women resumed their strike Aug. 31. They are now on another pause, attorney Jackie Kline told the Militant.
Most of the women have been detained more than 60 days, and some more than a year.
“I have been here for 320 days,” Amparo Osorio, from Honduras, told the New York Times in early September. Osorio’s 2-year-old son is with her. “What we want is for our voices to be heard.”
“We wake up and we see the same walls, the same ceiling,” 16-year-old Estefani Leiva, the oldest child at Berks, told the Times. As of Sept. 24, she, her mother and sister have been detained there for 395 days. “And we think to ourselves, ‘When will this end?’”
The detainees, who are challenging the government’s blanket decision to deny them refuge, are constantly under guard. The children are not permitted to attend public school and must wear IDs around their necks. The women get $1 a day to clean up the detention center, and at night they are awakened at least three times an hour for bed checks.
The Berks facility is the oldest of three family immigration detention centers in the U.S. — two larger and privately owned prisons are in Karnes County and Dilley, Texas.
Berks County authorities get $300 a day per detainee from Washington to run the center, attorney Matthew Archambeault, who has represented some of the women, told NPR.
In February the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services revoked the center’s license, saying it was licensed only as a “child resident facility,” not a detention center, but Berks authorities are being allowed to keep the prison open while they appeal the ruling.
In an “historically unprecedented” decision, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, told NPR Sept. 7 that a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit Court in Philadelphia ruled that the women “have no right to go to federal court to obtain review of their asylum” because they entered the country “surreptitiously.”
“If the ruling stands, it will be the first time in the history of this country in which noncitizens who are on U.S. soil did not have the right to review,” Gelernt said.
“Only suspended in times of rebellion or invasion, that right has been extended to slaves and, more recently, to noncitizen ‘enemy combatants’ held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba,” the Times wrote Sept. 2.
The ACLU is seeking a hearing to overturn the ruling before the full court of appeals and is asking that the women be released while the case is being considered.
The Barack Obama administration has been adamantly in favor of the detention centers — arguing that they are an essential deterrent to keep immigrant families from coming to the U.S.
Members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Berks County in Reading organized an interfaith protest vigil at Berks Sept. 6 and are planning more. Activities have also been held by the “Shut Down Berks Campaign,” which includes Juntos, an immigrant rights organization; Make the Road PA; Migrant Power Movement; and others.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home