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Last Thursday, the Obama Administration announced its intention to overhaul the nation’s immigrant detention system. Though details are still forthcoming, the administration is apparently looking to centralize authority over the loose patchwork of public jails and private prisons that currently house violators of immigration law. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledged that these proposed changes could take years to fully implement. However, one decisive move announced last week declared that the T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas would be closed. The facility had been under much criticism during the Bush administration for holding children behind razor wire and was the subject of a successful lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The closure constitutes the biggest immigration policy break of the Obama administration with its predecessor although other policies have been embraced and even expanded. Immigrants detained in a correctional facility in Southern Louisiana staged a hunger strike recently to jointly protest the lack of medical care and the decision by the Obama administration to not set legally enforceable standards for immigrant detention. Guards responded to the Louisiana hunger strikers by placing them in disciplinary segregation.

GUEST: Aura Bogado, freelance journalist and writer.

Read Bogado’s article at http://www.alternet.org/rights/141840/immigrant_detainees_staging_hunger_strikes_to_protest_deplorable_confinement/