A hunger strike at a Texas immigrant detention center for women has swelled from 27 women to potentially hundreds, and three ringleaders have faced retaliation from the facility, activists said on Tuesday.
Women at T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, began the strike last Wednesday in hopes of being released, said Cristina Parker of Grassroots Leadership, a group publicizing the women's protest.
"They're only after one thing, and that's release," Parker said.
Female detainees told Parker's organization this week that almost all of them are now participating in the ts they are facing retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Corrections
Corporation of America, the private prison company that operates the Hutto facility.
Parker said one woman was placed in solitary confinement from Saturday to either Sunday evening or Monday morning, and said prison employees turned up the air conditioning to make it uncomfortably cold. Officials transferred two other women from the Hutto facility and they are now being detained in another immigrant center in Texas, according to ICE's detainee locator tool.
ICE agents are pressuring the hunger strikers to eat by placing food in front of them and demanding they eat it, according to Parker. She also said they're being barred from going outside after 5 p.m.
Corrections Corporation of America referred questions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who denied the women's allegations.
From: Huffington Report.
No comments:
Post a Comment