The Least of These is a film about the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, opened in May 2006, as a family detention facility. It houses children and their parents who are waiting for asylum hearings or deportation proceedings.

The center opened with little media or public attention, but concerned an immigration attorney who received frequent calls from the detainees. The attorney teamed up with the ACLU and the Women’s Refugee Commission to investigate conditions, and thus was born the documentary, which will screen in Washington, D.C. today.

You can watch the whole film and for free at the SnagFilms site, here.

From the page at SnagFilms:  ”The film explores the government rationale for family detention, conditions at the facility, collateral damage, and the role (and limits) of community activism in bringing change.  The film leads viewers to consider how core American rights and values – due process, presumption of innocence, upholding the family structure as the basic unit of civil society, and America as a refuge of last resort – should apply to immigrants, particularly children.”

Much more information, history, and an interview with an official from the detention facility is at Hispanic Nashville.

Via Latina Lista, an item about the U.S. Naval Academy launching a campaign to attract more Latinos, which includes a seven-part graphic novel series called Bravo Zulu. The novel will be given free to high schoolers. The same post included a video from the bilingual cable network mun2, which sponsored a concert for soldiers and their loved ones.

I watched part of the video — it is long — and was fascinated by all the young, Latino culture that I apparently may be too old for. Wow. There’s a lot of content over at mun2 — music, people, edgy stuff. To catch up on el pop, I’m going to be hanging out over there a bit.

Y tu?