Chris Christie Champions Horrendous Company Running Horrible Texas Detention Center
"Community Education Centers" sounds like a perfectly lovely company, right? Far from it. In Texas, CEC runs the Polk County immigrant detention center which is routinely deemed one of the nation's worst. While people wait for asylum in the United States, numerous groups have found that they live in horrendous conditions in an ICE-licensed facility.
"I've visited a bunch of detention facilities in Texas, and that's by far the worst," said Bob Libal, director of Grassroots Leadership, a prison reform group. "Inadequate medical care, poor nutrition, lack of access to legal services, absence of meaningful programming, and a willful neglect of those who are imprisoned there plague the Polk detention center." Those observations were made in 2012 and 2013.
Thousands of miles from Texas, a man who puts the 'bully' in 'bully pulpit' serves as CEC's greatest advocate. Maybe it's that Christie served two years as a registered lobbyist for CEC. Maybe it's that the company's long-time senior vice president, Bill Palatucci, is one of Christie's closest friends. Such a close friend, in fact, that rumors swirled about Christie appointing him to deceased Sen. Lautenberg's seat. Palatucci's political involvement with Christie would have been far from new: he chaired the governor's 2013 re-election campaign and co-chaired the inauguration committee. "There is probably nobody more important to Chris Christie's political operation than Bill Palatucci," former New Jersey GOP chairman Jay Webber said last month. It was Palatucci's stepping down from CEC in 2012 that has allowed him to get increasingly involved in Christie's political team.
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Do these inhuman conditions sound like something Chris Christie would approve of or willingly ignore in his own state? Unfortunately, yes, and even more unfortunately, yes he has.
More at http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/14746/chris-christie-champions-horrendous-company-running-horrible-texas-detention-center .
