Editorial: Questionable treatment

Monday, Feb. 26, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

A report by two U.S. nonprofit groups that work with refugees says that a Homeland Security Department's detention center for illegal immigrant families allows treatment that is inhumane or inappropriate - especially for the young children detained in them.

According to a story by The Washington Post on Thursday, the report was jointly issued by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. It focused on conditions at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas, a 512-bed detention center for illegal immigrants.

The facility, operated by the Homeland Security Department, is for immigrants seeking political asylum from countries other than Mexico and is designed to prevent the separation of families who are found to be in the United States illegally. Until last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials sent parents and teens to age-appropriate detention centers, while very young children and infants were placed with foster families, the Post reports.

Certainly, finding a way to keep these families together as they await their immigration fate - a process that can take several months or more - is more humane than separation. But the conditions described in the nonprofit organizations' report sound more like a prison camp than a family detention center.

At the Texas facility, the report says, children routinely are allowed only one hour of play daily, and it is the only time they "have access to age-appropriate toys." Educational services are poor; children's meals are rushed, and health care often is inadequate for children and pregnant women.

Corporal punishment is not allowed, but disciplinary practices against adults and children have included staff members' threats of separating families, verbal abuse and withholding recreation or using temperature as punishment - such as keeping rooms extremely cold. Some of these tactics wouldn't be tolerated for use against convicted criminals. But the U.S. government uses them to punish children who run in hallways?

It is important to detain people who have entered the United States illegally until their immigration status is determined. But there is no excuse for treating them inhumanely. Detention centers shouldn't be country clubs, but they don't have to strip the dignity from people who, in many cases, are here to escape persecution elsewhere. The United States can do better - even behind locked gates.