 Our next panelist is Rebecca Flores, who is an advocate for refugee mothers and their children. Thank you, Kathy. I am not with an organization. I live here in San Antonio, and I think I'm really concerned about the mothers and the children who are being incarcerated in the prisons, in cairns, and in dilly towns. I have a good mother who crossed the border from Central America because they were fleeing violence in their country. Violence from their spouses, from their partners, from the police, from the military, violence that they just had to get away with. And if you look at the Central American countries, there's not too much where you can go to. If you're fleeing violence in Honduras, you can't go very far to flee from it. And so they chose these women, these brave and courageous women, chose to pick up their kids, their child, their two or three children, and come all the way across Mexico and cross the border into the United States and turn themselves into the border patrol, who then did this to them. They put them in what we call, what they call, Ayedera first, for two or three days. Ayedera is the icebox where they froze them. This was all the whole idea of deterrence by the border patrol, by our government, by the people who we support with our taxes. So they put them in these freezers, gave them in the states. They slept on the cement floors and they gave them an aluminum foil to cover themselves with. These were women and their babies. Isn't that a shame? Then from there they went to La Carrera, which is called the doghouse, which was a place with cyclone fences, and they said that was better for their daily time of mattress. Their food was bologna sandwiches three times a day. Finally, after they went through the Ayedera La Carrera in four to six days, they were sent to either Carnes and Dilly. In Carnes and Dilly then they were in jail. These two places are private for-profit prisons. They have been mandated by Congress, by the bill that mandates these prisons to be in a place, to have up to 34,000 people sleeping in those beds. Each bed is paid for by us and we pay CCA and GEO, or the owners of these corporations, up from $200 to $300 a night for each person who is there, for each night that they are there. Our taxpayer money is going to incarcerate women and children who have fled their countries and asked for asylum in this country. There is nothing illegal or criminal about asking for asylum in this country. Nothing, and yet they've made them criminals and they're keeping them in prison and we are paying for them to be kept in those prisons. Some of these women were in prison for a year. Calculate that. Calculate that in your own head. How much money we are paying for that one person and that one child to be there. What I have learned because of this is that these private prisons are getting popular. More and more and more there is privatization of prisons. And we should be really scared about that because they're not in the business of getting people out. I'm not saying that the public prisons are. But they are not in the business of getting people out. They are in the business of keeping people in as long as they can so they can get paid as much as they can for every night that they are there. They not only get, they get the counter, let me just tell you a little bit about cars and building. If anyone, if any of you, and tell me when my five minutes are up. Okay. Because I'm on a roll here and I'm out of here. Let me tell you, okay, that everything is bottom line business. Okay, so for example, the women work there and they clean the walls and they mop the floors and stuff. They get $1 an hour for three hours a day. $1 an hour. That dollar goes into the commissary part, which they have to spend the commissary. A bottle of water, a bottle of water which you can buy for a quarter, 40 cents at Walgreens. They have to pay $1.25 for it. Marucha, which are the noodles and everybody eats those things because they hate the commissary for the food. They pay, you can buy that at each of you for what, a quarter or 30 cents? They pay over $1 for those things. And so everything is the bottom line. How much can they bleed out of those women? One is by working them, right, working them so that they don't have to pay somebody on their contract, right? So they'll have to pay them and then taking their money back whenever, whichever way they can. CCA and GEO are two of nine poor profit prisons in the state of Texas that have something like 55 prisons in the state. I don't know how many they house, but I know that GEO and CCA and Carson Dilly have about 3,600 beds that they fill every night and we pay them up to $300 a night to have them fill. That's a mandate from the Department of Homeland Security to have them fill it. I am very interested in putting an end to, and I know the people who are here, once again, this business of imprisoning people for no reason whatsoever. I mean you just hear it all the time. But these women did not commit a crime. You watch what the Cubans are doing. The Cubans are being flown in, and I am not against the Cubans, but the Cubans are being flown in. Okay, just one more, I just, where were you at? Flowning in, flown in from Nicaragua, I think, flown in to the United States and as soon as they touch the soil in this country, they get a green card. They become legal resident aliens and therefore they are in. But the people from Central America, women and children, look at you, how many women are here with little babies. They have to suffer the consequences of leaving their violent country, their violent country, military that we trained to be violent and they come here and we treat them in this way. And once they're gone, let me give you a minute and we'll talk to you. Once they're out of there, once they're out of there, they have no resources. Everyone thinks as soon as you, as soon as you're in this country, you get food stamps, you get all the welfare possible, right? That is just an absolute lie. These women then are thrown out there in their communities and there is no resources for them. One woman, who I have been following since she left with her parents, she went to California, rent for one room is $600 a month in California. One room. I sent her to the church, I said, go ahead and get some food there. There's a pantry there, St. Vincent de Paul, I know it. So you ask her for an ID. You cannot get an ID of this kind. Anyway, it just goes on and on. A lot of this really is what my colleague here said earlier, is that the reason these folks are in prison is because of legislative changes as to what is the criminal offense and unless we come to grips with our legislators and with our voting patterns, we're going to continue to see the increase of those kinds of reactions to any kind of issue that's coming up from our population. For example, prior to 2005, most of the immigrants who came in from Mexico were deported and just pushed back into Mexico, right? But apparently, this is what I think, is that the private for-profit prisons started lobbying and when these folks from Central America who were a distance from Mexico came in, they started lobbying so that they would become criminals and so they became criminals. These women became criminals and the crime they committed was unlawful entry. So because you're a criminal, then you have to be incarcerated. And so it's all a law that was passed by some lobbying group, really, because tell me who, I mean, I know she's lobbying, but you know what? Advocating. But I know that she doesn't have the money that the big lobbying groups have to push for these big, big changes in the way we are treated in this country. And unless we come involved and let's start talking to each other about these inane things that we've been thrown in jail for, we're never going to convince our neighbors that this is wrong because everybody says, well, you know, he was looking dope, and you should go to jail. I mean, that's our mindset. And we've got to change that mindset. Every time I go to a family outing, I talk to my family, I know they're sick of it, about what's going on in the crime scene, really. And I tell them, you know, I tell them repeatedly because they don't understand it. They kind of get, you know, their eyes gloss over. But we've got to convince them and talk to them that immigrants who come from seeking asylum are not criminals and they shouldn't be. They always ask, well, where are they going to keep them? Well, the real truth of the matter is that when you come into this country and you're seeking asylum, you can load your family. You can load your family in LA or in Philadelphia or wherever, and they can support you. And they can take care of you. You don't have to be incarcerated, but nobody understands that. They all think, well, you need to keep them somewhere. So I think a lot of it is legislative. I think a lot of it is paying attention to who we're electing and what laws are being passed because every person in jail is in jail because some law was passed and they were made criminals. And so we've got to pay attention to that. And so I participate once with this group called Interfaith Welcome Coalition. And I'm really here because I was connected to them and that's when I started visiting Carnes and Dilly. And you know where Carnes and Dilly are located, right? Do you even know that? It's like 60 miles south of here. It's here. It's in our geography. And the right there is where this stuff is happening. So the Interfaith Welcome Coalition meets every second Thursday at the First Presbyterian Church on the corner of McCulloch and Alamo. And we welcome you to come and participate in that so you can figure this stuff out. And then maybe you can visit the women in Carnes and Dilly and then you can learn what's going on in their cloth. I think a lot of it takes looking at these women and seeing what they're going through and then being able to come out and talk about it. So there, every second Thursday Interfaith Welcome Coalition meeting at the First Presbyterian Church on I think the address is 101 McCulloch. 404 South Alamo. What did you say? 404. I'm sorry. 404 South Alamo. Wrong. Yeah. I'm sorry. 404 North Alamo. Yeah, yeah. And it's tomorrow. The meeting is tomorrow. Well, thank you, Marla. Listen. I didn't know you were there. At 10 a.m. Meeting's tomorrow. And so that's... And I'm coming here as a... We have a committee called Advocacy and the Advocacy Committee put together this information for me so that I can tell them in three seconds. So please come. Like I say, it's 60 miles south of here. It's real close. I don't know if there's prisoners here at San Antonio. But this is women and children. For God's sake, it's a crime to be imprisoning women and children. It really is. We haven't been in no crime.