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Dallas Morning News – February 1, 2007
U.S. detention of local Palestinians'
children draws criticism
Paul Meyer and Frank Trejo
Four years ago, members of the Ibrahim family sat in a Dallas immigration courtroom and calmly cataloged the years of violence in their Palestinian village: the deaths of children, the bombs and beatings. But now, denied asylum and confined for a third consecutive month inside a pair of Texas detention centers, they just want to go home.
Any home, in any country, will do. Even if it means returning to the land they fled.
So far, however, Salaheddin Ibrahim, his pregnant wife, Hanan, and four of their five children remain in a legal and geopolitical limbo. And their plight has drawn sharp criticism from civil rights activists and intensified debate about the decision to detain immigrant children in a facility near Austin.
The Ibrahims were denied asylum and ordered deported in 2003 before being apprehended at their Richardson apartment during a November immigration raid.
But they have been unable to secure the right to cross into their Palestinian homeland through Jordan or Israel, their attorneys say, leaving them with no place to go. Lawyers have sent letters to 54 countries, including the Vatican, asking each to accept the family. They have also planned a series of legal challenges, many to be filed this week, to win their release…..
Mr. Ibrahim is being held in a detention center in Haskell, near Abilene. His wife and four of their children – ages 5, 8, 14 and 15 – are in the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility near Austin, one of two facilities in the nation dedicated to the detention of non-Mexican immigrant families and children.
Another Ibrahim child, 3-year-old Zahra, who was born in the U.S. and is a citizen, is in the care of a relative in far northeast Dallas.
Rita Zawaideh, chairwoman of the Seattle-based Arab American Community Coalition, says the Ibrahim case is about the fate of hundreds of children now facing detention. The coalition is helping fund the family's legal team, led in part by Mr. Cox, New York lawyer Joshua Bardavid and Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas real-estate developer who waged a high-profile battle with immigration officials last year to keep his Chinese wife in the country.
"We are trying to do this for all children," Ms. Zawaideh said. "No child should be arrested. No child should be imprisoned in this way. This is the U.S.A. They are not rapists. They are not murderers. It is morally wrong to imprison children."
Unaccompanied children, mostly from Latin America, are housed across the country in a series of less-restrictive shelters built in recent years under the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Minors accompanied by families, however, now face more traditional detention settings…..
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-palfamily_01met.ART.North.Edition1.2988a96.html
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