Between the Fences: Before Guantanamo, there was the Port Isabel Service Processing Center - Softcover

"People who care about social justice and America's image in the world should read former prison guard Tony Hefner's disturbing account of sexual and physical abuse at Port Isabel. We need to know. Was Port Isabel an isolated case of prisoner abuse or does similar abuse occur at other detainee centers? Has the abuse ended at Port Isabel or does it still occur? How do we know? What, if anything, is the federal government doing to monitor what happens behind the closed doors and locked gates of its detainee centers?"--Carol M. Swain, editor of "Debating Immigration"

Hefner, a guard in the 1980s at the Port Isabel immigration detention center in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, witnessed physical, emotional, financial, and drug-related abuses perpetrated on detainees by INS officers. Hefner cites instances of gross misconduct, and laments "the men, women, and children caught between the fences of U.S. government policy and the degenerate power of its enforcers" at Port Isabel. He recalls that INS officers and security supervisors demanded sexual favors from detainees, for example, and unlawful inspections of detainee court papers and possessions. Though Hefner empathized with his fellow guards, he made efforts to stop the abuse, contacting the Office of the Inspector General, the FBI, leading state politicians, and even the U.S. Attorney General, though he doesn't know if his efforts resulted in any action. The author's ethical and political positions are clear; while we send armed servicemen and women to prison for abuse abroad, he states, we don't ."..hold federal officials accountable for the same crimes within our own borders." His book is a valuable first-person account of an important and timely subject.
--" Publisher's Weekly "--

"Read former prison guard Tony Hefner's disturbing account of sexual and physical abuse at Port Isabel. What, If anything, is the federal government doing to monitor what happens behind the closed doors and locked gates of its detention centers?"---Carol M. Swain, editor of Debating Immigration

"Tony Hefner's descriptions of human rights abuses at the Port Isabel Center mirror the complaints that continue to emerge from the facility---including reports from over one hundred detainees who went on a hunger strike there in 2009."---Catherine Tactaquin, executive director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

In the Rio grande Valley, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States, good jobs are scarce and the Port Isabel Service Processing Center---one of the largest immigration detention centers in America---pays the best wayes for a hundred miles. The guards Follow orders and keep quiet.

For five years, Tony Hefner served as a security guard at the detention facility and witnessed alarming corruption and constant violations of basic human rights. Between the Fences is the shocking story of the systematic sexual, physical, financial, and drug-related abuses by Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] officers, and the incredible courage of the author, several fellow guards, and many brave detainees who stood up against it. With 400,000 immigrant detainees in US custody annually, Between the Fences is a call to action demanding that we look inside the detention centers on our own soil and consider how they are run.