By Marcos Restrepo at The Florida Independent
As part of a permanent campaign to protest a proposed immigration detention center in South Florida, more than 60 residents and immigrant advocates gathered Saturday to stage the Stations of the Cross.
Residents of Pembroke Pines and the town of Southwest Ranches have voiced opposition to the detention center since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE) first announced it had chosen the Southwest Ranches/Corrections Corporation of America proposal in June 2011.
Jose Machado is a 17-year-old high school student who came to the U.S. at the age of 6 and with the support of an attorney has filed for a visa that would allow him to stay and gradually obtain permanent immigration status. Machado told The Florida Independent Saturday that his mother was deported in 2011 after losing her immigration court case. Machado now lives with a cousin, goes to school and works to help pay bills.
Machado opposes the privately managed immigration detention center because “they’re trying to make money from detaining immigrants,” adding that “it symbolizes separation of family, damaging people psychologically and emotionally.”
Denise Schroder — a resident of Southwest Ranches who, with about six other people, was at the event to show her support for the proposed immigration detention center — told the Independent, “I believe it’s a holding place. I don’t believe it’s a prison, where they treat people bad because they’ve done bad things.”
Schroder said it would be good “if the government came up with something” to help immigrants and create a system that would allow them to “pay their fair share.” She also said “there is a right way and wrong way of doing it and coming here illegally is not the right way to do it.”
“I support this because I know it is going to create more jobs, and the revenue that’s coming from it, I want the money for my town,” Schroder said.
The Florida Carpenters Regional Council also supports the detention center, saying it will get “hundreds of people working and off the unemployment rolls.”
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Increasingly, feature-length political documentaries are using new technology to get their films seen. You may recall that the Sarah Palin biopic The Undefeated was made available last September on video-on-demand and pay-per-view to approximately 75 million homes through major cable and satellite companies such as DirecTV, Dish Network, and Time Warner Cable. Now in time for the election cycle, liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald is employing the same methods with his take on Koch Brothers Exposed which starts streaming on May 8th. 
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