Two suburban attorneys spent nearly a week earlier this year offering free legal advice to women being held at a federal detention center for asylum-seekers in Texas – an effort they say is increasingly urgent as the nation debates U.S. policy toward those fleeing persecution or violence in their home countries.
“There are all kinds of things going on at the federal level to try and quicken the pace of deportations (of detained asylum seekers in the U.S.),” said lawyer Virginia Martinez of Oak Park. She, along with Glencoe attorney Chris Cohen and an interpreter, traveled to the South Texas Family Residential Center in February to advise women – mostly from South or Central America – seeking asylum in the U.S.
News outlets have reported in recent months that, under the Trump administration, new guidance for officers handling such cases could make it more difficult for asylum-seekers to enter the U.S.
The Dilley, Texas, facility, about 80 miles southwest of San Antonio and run by a private company for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has a capacity of 2,400 people, but as of April 18 had 228 residents, according to ICE spokeswoman Adelina Pruneda.
ICE said in a statement that family residential centers are a humane way for families to go through immigration proceedings, and that they provide medical and mental health care, educational services and access to legal counsel.
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The attorneys’ trip was part of an effort by the CARA Family Detention Project, an advocacy group that seeks volunteers to provide pro bono representation for detained children and their mothers. CARA is run by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services and the American Immigration Lawyers Association and asserts that detainees do not have access to a fair legal process.
Cohen, who works in private practice as a government affairs attorney and self-funded his trip to Dilley, said he was shaken by many of the stories he heard from the women, who told him they were fleeing gangs, extreme violence, rape and enforced prostitution.
“If there was any volunteer lawyer who remained dry-eyed for the entire week, I don’t know who it was,” he said.
Cohen said one 22-year-old Guatemalan woman told him she left her factory town after inadvertently witnessing a member of one of the town’s so-called “narco” gangs shoot a young boy in the face, killing him. When a female member of the gang came to her home the next day, she told him, the gang member sliced the woman’s arms with a razor blade as a warning not to talk to police about the shooting. Cohen said that was the impetus for the woman to gather her toddler son and begin a five-month-long trip to the U.S.
“There’s a lot of what would, in war, be called post-traumatic stress syndrome among these people,” he said.
The woman was soon picked up by a border patrol and spent an additional five months in detention before Cohen spoke to her, he said.
At the center, volunteer attorneys helped detainees fill out paperwork and explain the legal process. Cohen said attorneys worked in a trailer for 12 hours a day, and described the stream of detainees seeking legal advice as “an assembly line.”
Cohen said the women don’t have the right to legal representation when they go through what’s known as a “credible fear interview” with an ICE officer as they apply for asylum. If an asylum officer does not find that the detainee has a credible fear of persecution or torture if removed from the U.S., she could be immediately deported, according to the ICE website.
But if the asylum-seeker is found to have credible fear, the officer will refer her to an immigration judge for a full hearing, after which she could be allowed to remain in the U.S., Cohen said.
He said volunteers usually don’t know the fate of the women and children they work with. Some may wind up being deported, but they may also be released with an ankle monitor, or on bond, with the requirement to live with another family member in the country until they have another hearing before an immigration judge, he said.
All the information he and other volunteers worked on is put into a CARA database, allowing future volunteers to carry on individual cases after their project predecessors leave, said Cohen, who is also an administrative law judge and served as Chicago’s 46th Ward alderman in the 1970s.
Martinez, who was appointed to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in March and is awaiting Senate confirmation, said the women’s challenges continue even after they reach the U.S.
“As a human being, it’s heartbreaking to hear these stories and to understand they have gone through so much, and we make them go through more at the border,” Martinez said. “These are not economic immigrants. These are asylum-seekers who are in real danger in their own country.”
The February trip was Martinez’s fourth to the facility. She said women reported that some border patrol officers have told them that U.S. law has been changed under Trump and they can’t seek refuge in the U.S., which is incorrect.
“There are many changes in the law, but (the women) still have a right to apply for asylum,” she said.
ICE officials, however, said no official at the center has told residents that policies or regulations regarding asylum have been changed. The agency provides weekly presentations to help residents understand the immigration process and how to access free or low-cost legal service providers on site, a spokesperson said.
Martinez, who will return to the Dilley facility in July and paid for her most recent trip with donations solicited on a GoFundMe page, said the detainees face an uncertain future as the U.S. discusses its stance on immigration procedures.
“I don’t think people know exactly the extent of what the changes are going to be in terms of asylum-seekers,” she said.
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