Between The Fences: Before Guantanamo, There Was the Port Isabel Processing Center

(Paperback)

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Something at the Texas detention facility is terribly wrong, but the guards are repeatedly told not to speak of anything they witness. Due to job shortages, the guards follow orders. For six years, Tony Hefner was a security guard at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, one of the largest immigration detention centres in America. While there, he witnessed alarming corruption and violations of human rights. Officers preyed on the very people who they were sworn to protect. This is the story of the systematic sexual, physical and financial abuses of detainees by guards.

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The tension within the pages ofBetween the Fenceshinges on the narrator, son of an undocumented Mexican laborer, trained as a protestant minister. Hefner invites the readers to share in his own limitations and frustrations as he struggles to findthen to maintainthe courage to challenge the corruption in the face of indifferent-to-hostile federal agencies. San Antonio Current


A valuable first-person account of an important and timely subject. Publishers Weekly


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 Carol M. Swain, editor of Debating Immigration

Author Bio

TONY HEFNER is a human rights activist and founder of the Bearing Precious Seed Ranch ministry in Southern Texas for local Hispanic children. He has appeared on Inside Edition, PBS, and many other radio and television news programs where he reported the abuses taking place at Port Isabel. Tony and his wife Barbara now live in northern Michigan, where he continues his fight with national officials for new investigations.