The least of these: Family detention in America
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T h e l east of t he se : Family detention i n A m er i ca A Documentary by Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda (dir.) DVD, Indiepix Films, 2009, $24.95, 74 minutes, Color Latino Studies (2011) 9, 160–162. doi:10.1057/lst.2011.7
During his historic election campaign, Senator Obama stated that comprehensive immigration reform would be “a top priority in my first year as president.” As 2009 came to a close, however, it became evident that a national immigration overhaul would have to wait, without any clear time frame or precise goals for reform. “When we come back next year y we should be in a position to start acting,” Obama declared at a summit of Mexican and Canadian leadership in August 2009 (Nicholas and Wilkinson, 2009). In its place, without new legislation from the then-majority Democratic congress, limited immigration reforms as well as status quo continuances and enhancements of policies initiated by the Bush administration have been pursued by means of Obama’s cabinet level authorities. Of these administrative modifications, planned reform of the immigrant detention system among other revamped enforcement initiatives are most prominent. The clearest and most definitive change has been the administration’s stance on family detention of noncitizens, the subject of the 2009 documentary, The Least of These: Family Detention in America by filmmakers Clark and Jesse Lyda. The documentary addresses the detention of immigrant families seeking asylum in the United
States or fighting deportation, by way of a focused analysis of the highly controversial immigrant prison in Taylor, Texas, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. The facility has been plagued by controversy since it began detaining families, including children, in the converted state prison in May 2006. The Least of These carefully relates the government’s strategy of detaining immigrant families, national immigration enforcement initiatives as well as exposing the unknown and obscured conditions of incarceration for families in the Hutto facility. The film remains focused on the welfare of detained children and two fundamental questions: 1) Why are children in detention in the first place?; and 2) How will the childhood experience of being incarcerated affect them in the future? It details the conditions in the “residential center,” run for profit by the private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA): the lack of education, recreation and adequate healthcare; poor dietary provisions; exposed toilets in jail cells; unlicensed punishment and discipline by guards; and violations of due process among other issues. The Least of These provides a glimpse of the disruptions to family life and parental authority for immigrants, most commonly
r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 9, 1, 160–162 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
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presumed to be undocumented Mexicans, but who are primarily asylum seekers or persons being deported for civil immigration violations from over 30 countries, except Mexico. Half of the det
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