Vox
By Dara Lind
June 24, 2015
On June 3, Lilian
Oliva Bardales — a 19-year-old Honduran woman with a 4-year-old son —
locked herself in the bathroom of the Karnes immigration detention
center in Texas (where she and her son had been held
since October) and tried to slit her wrist using a broken ID bracelet.
She'd fled Honduras and an abusive ex-partner for the United States and
the hope of asylum, but after several months in detention with hundreds
of other families from Central America, she
lost hope.
"I didn't feel alive in that place," she told a reporter in Honduras, where she was deported after her suicide attempt.
The suicide attempt
was just another reminder of what a disaster the detention of hundreds
of immigrant families from Central America has been. Since the
government started detaining families last summer,
reports have surfaced that children are being malnourished, facilities
are overcrowded, and immigrants with serious medical conditions aren't
receiving proper care. The pressure has been building for the government
to stop keeping families in detention for
months on end.
Department of
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced on Wednesday that the
US was taking steps to end — or at least restrict — the long-term
detention of immigrant families. Instead of families
being kept in detention through the entire process of determining
whether they're eligible for asylum, they'll be released on bond if they
pass the first stage of the asylum process — which 88 percent of
detained families, according to official statistics,
are clearing.
The change in
policy implies something very uncomfortable for the government: that
they were wrong all along about why Central American families were
coming and what they would do in the US.
Since the migrant
crisis last summer, the federal government has treated these families as
a border security problem, rather than as asylum seekers. But it's
clear that detaining 4-year-olds for months on
end is more of a PR liability for the government than an asset to
border security — especially because we're not seeing a repeat of last
summer's migrant crisis. Now the government has been forced to
acknowledge that many of the families coming to the US are
going through the proper legal process to stay.
A "shitshow" from the very beginning
Just like many
people are kept in jail while fighting their cases in criminal court,
the US government keeps many immigrants in detention after they're
apprehended at the border or within the US, while processing
their deportation cases. Those cases can take a while to process,
especially when an immigrant is asking for asylum. Just like criminal
cases, immigrants in deportation cases can be released on bail — but the
government has to trust that they'll show up for
their court dates instead of simply escaping into the US.
Last summer, tens
of thousands of children and families arrived in the US from Central
America, overwhelming the government's resources. Many of them were
fleeing violence in Central America and wished to
get asylum in the US. But the government was worried that if it just
released families into the US after giving them court dates, they'd
never show up to court. Meanwhile, they wanted to show that they were
trying to fight the "border crisis." So part of the
US's response was to put many families in temporary detention
facilities, and build permanent ones to hold future immigrants.
In the words of
former American Immigration Lawyers Association head Laura Lichter, who
started representing detained families pro bono in August, family
detention was a "shitshow" from the very beginning.
Judges wouldn't let lawyers speak during hearings, and guards strictly
limited the access that lawyers got to their clients outside of the
courtroom — making it extremely hard for lawyers to put together the
information that would prove families qualified
for asylum. And plenty of families simply got deported without ever
seeing a lawyer.
But once lawyers
began to get access and help clients build cases for asylum, families
started winning the early stages of their court cases, or appealing them
after a loss — but were often still kept in
detention while those cases were resolved. Now there are about 2,600
families — many of whom have been there for months — in three detention
centers.
Life in detention: malnourished children and rushed court hearings
There are strict
rules in place (determined by a federal court in the 1990s) about how
the government treats immigrant children. Those make it impossible to
detain families in standard immigration detention.
Past attempts to open large detention centers that are just for
immigrant families have failed because it was just too hard to adhere to
those standards. And from the beginning of family detention last year,
there's been evidence that the government wasn't
succeeding this time around, either.
Meanwhile, life in
detention was clearly taking a toll on families — especially on
children. The New York Times Magazine reported in February:
The detainees
reported sleeping eight to a room, in violation of the Flores settlement
[the government's standards for immigrant children], with little
exercise or stimulation for the children. Many were
under the age of 6 and had been raised on a diet of tortillas, rice and
chicken bits. In Artesia, the institutional cafeteria foods were as
unfamiliar as the penal atmosphere, and to their parents’ horror, many
of the children refused to eat. "Gaunt kids,
moms crying, they’re losing hair, up all night," an attorney named
Maria Andrade recalled. Another, Lisa Johnson-Firth, said: "I saw
children who were malnourished and were not adapting. One 7-year-old
just lay in his mother’s arms while she bottle-fed him."
Mary O’Leary, who made three trips to Artesia last fall, said: "I was
trying to talk to one client about her case, and just a few feet away at
another table there was this lady with a toddler between 2 and 4 years
old, just lying limp. This was a sick kid,
and just with this horrible racking cough."
Once the government
replaced its temporary detention centers with permanent ones,
conditions improved slightly. But advocates continued to point out that
the government was detaining children with serious
health conditions. A letter sent to DHS by House Democrats last month
said that:
we have learned of
the detention of children with intellectual disabilities, a child with
brain cancer, a mother with a congenital heart disorder, a 14-day-old
baby, and a 12-year-old child who has not eaten
solid food for two months, among many others. Recently, we learned of a
three-year-old child at the Berks County Residential Center who was
throwing up for three days and was apparently offered water as a form of
medical treatment. It was only after the child
began throwing up blood on the fourth day that the facility finally
transferred her to a hospital.
A child
psychiatrist who had interviewed children at the Karnes facility, the
House Democrats' letter said, concluded they were "facing some of the
most adverse childhood conditions of any children I have
ever interviewed or evaluated."
The border crisis has faded — but this isn't the reason
The government
maintains that conditions in family detention are getting a lot better —
but no one's disputing that families would be even better off if they
got released. What the government has said, though,
is that it has to detain hundreds of immigrant families as a matter of
border security.
Initially, the
government justified opening its detention facilities by saying that
Central Americans wouldn't want to come to the US to begin with if they
knew they would be detained and possibly deported
when they arrived. And the correlation is there: There are way fewer
people coming to the US's southern border from Central America this
summer than there were last summer.
But correlation
doesn't imply causation. The biggest reason for the drop in entrances to
the US appears to be that Mexico is being extremely aggressive in
rounding up and deporting Central Americans before
they get to the Rio Grande. That doesn't indicate that people are being
deterred from leaving their home countries by the prospect of getting
detained in America.
Besides, in fall
2014 a judge ruled that "deterring future immigration" wasn't a good
enough reason to keep a family in detention who's already here — if the
government wanted to keep a family in detention
while their case was processed, it needed to demonstrate that that
particular family needed to be there.
The government is quietly admitting that many families are trying to do things "the right way"
A separate lawsuit
against the government says it's violating its standards for detaining
children. That suit has forced the government to negotiate with advocacy
groups, which it's been doing for a few months
(last week, the government got an extension to finish negotiations by
July 3).
The government has
shifted to arguing that if these families aren't detained, they'll
abscond into the United States rather than showing up for their asylum
hearings. This is the same logic that the government
has used from the beginning: that these families are trying to sneak
into the US illegally, and therefore need to be kept under lock and key.
But advocates and
lawyers argue that they're legitimately seeking asylum. And that means
it shouldn't be necessary to detain them. Someone who has a chance at
asylum will want to show up to court — especially
when being monitored some other way, like by an ankle bracelet.
Meanwhile, it's a
lot harder for an immigrant to put together an asylum case while locked
up. Without a lawyer, it's been nearly impossible for a detained family
to win an asylum case — as of February, 98.5
percent of women with children who passed the first stage of the asylum
process, but didn't have a lawyer to help them through, ended up losing
their cases and getting deported. And even with a lawyer, cases in
detention don't fare as well as cases outside
of detention.
With the new
policy, the government is finally admitting that once an immigrant
mother passes the first test for asylum, she and her family should be
trusted to follow through. DHS still talks about last
summer's crisis as a wave of "illegal migration," but it's quietly
acknowledging that many of the people who have come are seeking legal
status through legal means.
But families will
still have to start the asylum process in detention, and test their way
out. That's worrisome to advocates — they feel families are still being
put at a disadvantage by having to start their
case in detention, where they might not have access to the legal help
or the records they need. This is where the government's promise to put
families through the first stage of the asylum process quickly could end
up making things worse for some families
in detention. If a family is shuttled through quickly, but fails to
make their case, they won't be held in detention — they'll simply be
deported.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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