Report Calls for Closing Immigrant-Detention Center

Two advocacy groups have issued a report asking that an immigration center in Texas be shut down, claiming that the facility is tantamount to a prison and is inhumane, reports the Associated Press.

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center, which used to be a prison, houses immigrant families. Children were, until recently, given only one hour of schooling five days a week; now they are given four hours per day. Parents are not allowed to be with their children after “lights out.”

“In Hutto, it’s a prison,” says Michelle Brane, detention- and asylum-project director for the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children.

That group and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services interviewed detainees and visited Hutto and another site criticized in the report—-the Berks County Shelter Care Facility, in Pennsylvania. The report expresses fear that the government will increase the number of such detention facilities and suggests other methods of keeping track of immigrants: shelters, electronic bracelets, or parole.