On Friday, as many as 2,000 inmates at a detention facility in south Texas seized control of a section of the Willacy County Correctional Center, a privately owned prison contracted through the federal government. And no, you probably haven’t heard much about this on the national news.
The uprising led to an extended standoff between guards and inmates. Reports from Saturday afternoon indicated that the facility was secure, and the inmates, who had been wielding pieces of pipe, were compliant – although officials were still in “talks” with them to regain control of the entire prison.
According to early reports, the disturbances at the facility were enough to bring in additional law enforcement:
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A[s] corrections officers took breakfast to housing units as inmates began voicing their frustrations about medical services, the director said.
Some inmates broke out of the housing area and made their way into the recreational yard prompting a lockdown of the prison. Some inmates were seen shaking the fence.
Tear gas was used in an attempt to break up the disturbance, the prison spokesperson said in a news release. …
Small fires broke out in three of the units, and the Raymondville Fire Department is on scene for precautionary measures.
Schools in Raymondville, TX, a small town with a population of about 11,000, were reportedly on lockdown Friday afternoon.
The Willacy prison houses mostly illegals. The latest reporting from Saturday evening indicates that about 2,800 inmates will have to be moved elsewhere following the uprising, because the damage done has made much of the facility “uninhabitable.”
As I write this (shortly before midnight on 21 February, Texas time), officials have still not said the prison is back under control. The situation appears to be that officials are still “negotiating” with the recalcitrant inmates.
The facility has a double security fence, and law enforcement has emphasized from the beginning that prisoners have virtually no chance of getting out. In addition to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers are participating in the operation to secure the prison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1eSDOyUP-U
I imagine most readers have a similar reaction to this. It is, er, [fouled] up beyond belief for the U.S. federal government to create problems like this. The policies of the Obama administration are, quite literally, what caused this to happen.
Obama’s predecessors in the last 20 years never did an especially good job, but if the half-hearted policies enforced under Bush 43 and Clinton had merely continued after 2009, this situation would not have arisen in 2015. Under those earlier policies, the Border Patrol was allowed to make it harder for illegals to get in, and among those who did get in, a far greater percentage were, in fact, sneaking in because they wanted to work. That’s not an excuse for lax enforcement, but it does mean they were less dangerous overall.
Obama’s policies have caused the elements of ungovernable chaos and danger in the situation to metastasize. Under the current rules and conditions, the Border Patrol is physically unable to monitor the border and prevent the entry of illegals as it once could. Its agents are in substantially greater danger, short on weapons and body armor. In any case, they have to spend a wholly unjustifiable amount of their time attending to sick children, instead of keeping gang-bangers and delinquents out of the United States. And the gang-bangers and delinquents have been positively encouraged to come here, by the open-door atmosphere fostered, with lax enforcement, by the Obama administration.
As is inevitable with sanctimonious leftist policies, what Obama has produced, under the cynical banner of “empowering dreamers,” is prisons overflowing with resentful men: men in limbo, men with a “low-level” miscreant’s bad attitude and a sense of entitlement, who probably do have reason, from a humanitarian standpoint, to complain about the “medical services” made available to them, but who have no legitimate claim to the American taxpayer’s dime in the first place.
Whether Obama loves “America” or not, it is clear he has no love for the men who are warehoused in Raymondville. It would be far kinder to them to not even let them enter the country. The right thing to do is to treat them like men – with respect – and help the nations they came from. In no universe is a Willacy County Correctional Center full of disgruntled illegals the correct outcome for any policy. It is, however, the direct outcome of Obama’s signature radical-left policies.
