T. Don Hutto: Homeland Security Bars U.N. Inspector

Free the Children's Jay Johnson-Castro speaking out against the Hutto Center at the Capital.

By Patricia J. Ruland

Access denied – again.

Monday was the day that 2006 Nobel Peace Prize nominee and U.N. "rapporteur" (investigator) Jorge Bustamante was to have visited the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, the big house of increasingly ill repute owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, which does a booming business – about $35 million a year – imprisoning immigrant families, including children. Bustamante had planned to inspect TDH as part of his three-week fact-finding mission regarding migrant living conditions, then present his results to the United Nations General Assembly in June. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security clanged TDH's door shut on Bustamante at the last minute, however.

Read more from today's Austin Chronicle.