Pensacola, Fl
A Mexican woman filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic prison contractor on Wednesday, alleging that a man in streetwear beat her and raped her in a detention center in Houston and she gave birth to his daughter after her deportation.
After a three-month prison sentence at the Houston Treatment Center, Jane Doe was due to be sent to Mexico, she says in her federal lawsuit in Houston.
The Houston location is one of eight CoreCivic prisons where the company houses unregistered immigrants under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.
“We are subject to multiple levels of oversight, including regular on-site audits, audits and monitoring, and there are currently over 500 ICE officers assigned to our eight contracted ICE facilities,” CoreCivic says on its website.
The watchdog did not help Doe when she said she and two other detainees were transferred from their regular cell, where they were usually locked with 20 to 30 other women, to another cell in a secluded, dark part of the cell. A 1,000-bed prison that Du had never seen.
Do claims she has rarely seen men in prison because men and women are held in different wings, and female guards watch the inmates.
She said that three men in civilian clothes with their faces covered entered the cell around midnight and told them to remain silent.
While his companions attacked the other women, Doe claims, a man punched her in the face and twisted her arm. Lying on her back on the ground, she tried to deflect from him, but stopped resisting while his blows were raining down on her.
Do says the assaults lasted for an hour to 90 minutes before the men left the cell.
The three women were left crying and frightened. The complaint stated that they did not sleep the rest of the night.
Doe is represented by Michelle Simpson Twigl, a Dallas-based attorney specializing in sexual assault cases, and Jose Sanchez of Longview, Texas.
CoreCivic boasts annual revenues of over $ 1 billion and was founded in Nashville in 1983 as the Corrections Corporation of America. It renamed itself in 2016.
Allegations of abuse go back to their early days. Paralegals who provided legal services to immigrant families at the company’s detention center in Laredo, Texas in the 1980s say their guards searched mothers and children if the mother asked to see a lawyer. They were only searched if they requested a lawyer.
In her lawsuit, Do says she and two other victims were put on a bus the next morning with a group of migrants and taken to Laredo.
She alleges that her face was bruised and swollen as a result of the attack, and she had no money to take the bus to her home in rural Mexico. She stayed at the shelter for nine days until the shelter staff raised enough money to buy a bus ticket for her.
Du says she was experiencing nausea and vomiting, and realized she was pregnant. She knows her father was the man who assaulted her at the Houston facility because she did not have sex with anyone else, according to her lawsuit.
When the prosecutor told her family what had happened to her and that she was pregnant, they were very sad and angry. The plaintiff felt very depressed and lonely as a result of the shock of the assault and the subsequent pregnancy, “stated the complaint.
She gave birth to a daughter and says she lost a lot of blood due to C-section complications and was hospitalized for eight days
“This nightmare has caused me great harm and tension. I hope that the United States government and the directors of these private prisons will prevent this violence from happening to others.”
The defendants are USA, CoreCivic, four CoreCivic companies, a Florida corporation providing food services to prisons, Warden Robert Lacy Jr of the Houston Processing Center, and Warden’s assistant David Price, plus the men who assaulted Doe and her cellmates, identified Only as “attackers”.
Doe demands punitive damages for claims of negligence, stewardship, negligence, employment, retention of negligence, liability for premises, gross negligence, assault, beatings, wrongful imprisonment, emotional distress and malice.
According to the lawsuit, ICE awarded CoreCivic a $ 50 million contract in March to pay for Houston’s processing center operations through 2030, despite a tumultuous recent past.
“There were at least eight allegations of sexual assault at the Houston Treatment Center between March 2016 and March 2017. In 2019, there were at least eight allegations of sexual assault between an employee and a detainee, and four other allegations of a detainee – assault “Sexual detainee in the facility. Since 2003, the Houston treatment center has reported at least nine deaths.”
CoreCivic spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist declined to comment on the pending lawsuit but said the company was committed to the safety of all of its holders.
“We have a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual assault and sexual harassment. To ensure we fully comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), all staff receive pre-service and in-service education and training, and all detainees receive PREA education and training starting from initial reception and continuing during They are with us, she said in an e-mail statement.
