Asylum-Seeking Mothers Protest Family Detention From Inside a For-Profit Facility in Texas
Nearly 80 mothers detained with their children at a private immigrant family jail in South Texas have launched a hunger strike, refusing to eat, work, or use the facility’s services until they and their families are released — a direct challenge to a detention system that has locked up thousands of Central American women and children fleeing violence in their home countries.
Inside the Karnes Family Detention Center
The women are held at the Karnes County Residential Center, located in Karnes City, roughly 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. The facility is operated not by the federal government directly, but by the GEO Group, one of the two largest private prison companies in the country, under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many of the women held there fled Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala amid a surge of Central American migration driven by gang violence and instability in the region.
In a letter signed by dozens of the striking women, the mothers described the core of their demand plainly: release from detention while they pursue their asylum claims through the legal process, rather than remaining locked up indefinitely while their cases move forward. “We deserve to be treated with some dignity and that our rights, to the immigration process, are respected,” the letter states, according to reporting from Common Dreams. “We have come to this country, with our children, seeking refugee status and we are being treated like delinquents.”
A Legal Process Undermined by Prolonged Detention
What makes the women’s situation particularly striking, advocates say, is that many of them have already cleared a significant legal hurdle in the asylum process. According to Sameera Hafiz, a policy consultant with the immigrant advocacy group We Belong Together, most of the hunger strikers had already passed their “credible fear” interviews — the initial screening ICE uses to determine whether a detained immigrant has a legitimate basis for an asylum claim tied to persecution in their home country, cited in reporting from Truthdig. In other words, these are not, by the government’s own initial assessment, women with frivolous claims — they are women the system has already indicated may have a legitimate case for protection, who nonetheless remain locked up, in some cases for months, while that case slowly makes its way through immigration courts.
Retaliation Behind Closed Doors
The strike’s aftermath has drawn its own scrutiny. According to Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, which coordinates pro bono legal representation for many women held at Karnes, at least two of the striking mothers were placed into isolation rooms in the facility’s medical clinic alongside their children — a move advocates characterize as direct retaliation for participating in the strike, reported by HuffPost. ICE officials have pushed back on that characterization entirely, denying during a facility tour that isolation has ever been used as punishment at Karnes, and disputing that a hunger strike — technically defined as missing nine consecutive meals — took place at all. GEO Group has offered its own competing description of events, with one company executive reportedly characterizing the mothers’ protest not as a hunger strike but as a “boycott of dining facilities.”
That dispute over language — hunger strike versus dining boycott, retaliation versus routine medical housing — sits at the heart of a broader disagreement over how family detention itself should be understood: as a necessary tool for managing immigration enforcement, or as a system that traumatizes women and children who, by the government’s own preliminary screening, may have already established a credible fear of persecution back home.
Part of a Rapidly Expanding Detention System
Karnes is not an isolated facility, and the controversy surrounding it isn’t likely to fade quickly. Both GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the two dominant private prison operators contracting with ICE, have signaled plans to expand their family detention capacity through 2015. CCA’s newer facility in Dilley, Texas, roughly 70 miles southwest of San Antonio, is on track to become the largest family detention center in the country, with capacity for 2,400 detainees, and has already generated more than $21 million in revenue in a single fiscal quarter, according to figures reported by Truthout. Advocates monitoring conditions at Dilley have already reported early signs of trouble there as well, including a reported suicide attempt shortly after the facility opened.
For the women still inside Karnes, the strike represents a last available form of protest inside a system that offers detained asylum seekers few other levers of control over their own circumstances — a wager that public attention and sustained pressure might accomplish what months of navigating the legal system alone has not.
This story sits at the intersection of immigration policy and civil rights enforcement — for related coverage, browse our Policy & Rights archive.