Between the Fences: Before Guantanamo, There Was the Port Isabel Service Processing Center

Something at the Texas detention facility is terribly wrong, and Tony Hefner knows it. But the guards are repeatedly instructed not to speak of anything they witness. In the Rio Grande Valley, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States, good jobs are scarce and the detention facility pays the best wages for a hundred miles. The guards follow orders and keep quiet.

For six years, Tony Hefner was a security guard at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, one of the largest immigration detention centers in America, and witnessed alarming corruption and violations of basic human rights. Officers preyed upon the very people whom they are sworn to protect. On behalf of the 1,100 men, women, and children residing there on an average day, and the 1,500 new undocumented immigrants who pass through its walls every month, this is the story of the systematic sexual, physical, financial, and drug-related abuses of detainees by guards.

With the attention given to the poor treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, it's often forgotten that the US has for years run an extensive detention system for those who illegally enter the country--and that this system has long been alleged to routinely violate the rights of those people in its charge. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hefner worked for six years as a security guard at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas, where he witnessed first-hand violations of detainees' human rights and corruption on the part of officers who ran the center. Given that charges of maltreatment and corruption are still being made against the immigration detention system (now run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the reissue of this book is especially timely. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)