T. Don Hutto Residential Center

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center (formerly known as T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility) is a guarded, fenced-in, multi-purpose center currently used to detain non-US citizens awaiting the outcome of their immigration status. The center is located at 1001 Welch Street in the city of Taylor, Texas, within Williamson County. Formerly a medium-security state prison, it is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (known as ICE) through an ICE Intergovernmental Service Agreement with Williamson County, Texas. It is named after T. Don Hutto, who along with Robert Crants and Tom Beasley, co-founded the CCA on January 28, 1983 in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2006 , Hutto became an immigrant-detention facility detaining immigrant families.

Immigration-detention had begun to increase after 9/11. In October 2005, Michael Chertoff, then Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (HUD), which runs the ICE, announced the end of catch-and-release immigration policy to reduce illegal immigration to the United States and the security threat posed by it. By the summer of 2006 the catch-and-release policy had ended. As a result, by the end of 2006, the number of people in government custody for immigration-law violations increased by 79% from 2005. There were about 14,000 people being detained.

By 2000, Tennessee-based CCA's stocks hit their lowest, as it suffered from "poor management", prison riots and escapes. It had failed in the 1990s in its "bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee." T. Don Hutto opened in May 2006. Previously, illegal immigrants with children would be released with a notice to appear before an immigration judge. In some cases, where release was not approved by ICe, children were separated from their parents. Parents were sent to an adult facility while children were released to family, or sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. A 2007 report entitled "Locking Up Family Values" by the Women's Refugee Commission and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services documented conditions in the facility. The detainees were women and their children - most of whom were under the age of 10. (see Locking Up Family Values.

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