200 Locked Up & Under the Radar in Private Wakenhut Prison in Queens, NYC

According to an article written by the New York Daily News there are over 200 immigrants confined in the Wakenhut Detnetion Center in Queens, New York. This private prison has functioned to house immigrant males arrested after 9/11. Apparently, many of the men do not know why they are confined and are denied access to an attorney.  Last Monday, 175 of the imprisoned men went on a hunger strike to draw attention to this situation.  The Wackenhut prison is a converted warehouse building with no windows in the middle of a warehouse district in Springfield Gardens, Queens. It is drab and anonymous and out of the way, which works out well for keeping the men and women imprisoned in it out of New York's collective consciousness. Many of the Wackenhut prisoners - people from all over the world - have been deprived of freedom for years even though no terrorism-related or other criminal charges have been brought against any of them, it said. Yet the government refuses to release information about their status or what their future might be - even though few, if any, of the immigrant detentions since 9/11 have yielded any useful results for President George Walker Bush's "war on terror,". [more ] and [more ]