By Jonathan Blitzer
Linda Corchado, an immigration lawyer in El Paso, is the director of legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. She was born and raised in El Paso, and, aside from stints in Pennsylvania and New York, for college and law school, she has lived and worked in her native city for her entire life. The work of an immigration lawyer is extremely gruelling, especially along the border, and especially during the Trump Administration. Despite El Paso’s diversity and history of inclusiveness, it is notorious among legal practitioners for its tough immigration courts, where judges reject more than ninety per cent of asylum petitions, which is among the highest denial rates in the country. “I don’t think about losing when I take on cases,” Corchado told me. “I think about my clients’ stories, the events that transpired that led them here.”
When Donald Trump visited El Paso on Wednesday, in the wake of last weekend’s tragic attacks at a Walmart in the Cielo Vista shopping center, residents and local politicians organized in protest. One obvious reason was the President’s history of racist incitement. But his relationship to El Paso has a distinct history, as well. His Administration’s most aggressive enforcement measures have centered on El Paso, starting with the family-separation policy, which began as a pilot program in the border city in the summer of 2017. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration began implementing another policy, known as the Migration Protection Protocols, or M.P.P., which forced asylum seekers to wait indefinitely in northern Mexico while their cases move through U.S. immigration courts. As a result, thousands of asylum seekers have been stranded in Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s sister city, with tens of thousands more expected to join them by the year’s end. Of the five immigrant children who have died in government detention since December, four had been taken into custody in the El Paso area.
Corchado was talking to an asylum seeker when the shooting broke out on Saturday, and she continued working throughout the day. Now, in addition to her caseload, she has launched a project with her colleagues at Las Americas to explore the possibility of securing a type of non-immigrant visa, known as the U-visa, for the victims of Saturday’s attack. These visas would allow the survivors of the shooting to qualify for permanent legal status in the U.S., along with the family members of those who died and, potentially, some immediate bystanders. “Mexico is a part of El Paso’s family,” Corchado told me. “These visas are in line with El Paso’s spirit. They’re a way of validating someone’s experience and suffering, and turning their heartbreak into something that brings us all forward.”
Corchado’s account of working with El Paso’s immigrant community in the aftermath of Saturday’s attack has been edited and condensed.
“I saw the first alert about a shooting when I was home, at my apartment. I was getting off the phone with a separated mother who I’m tracking in Ciudad Juárez. The government separated her from her children on the grounds that she had an affiliation with the gangs. And I’m starting to unwind what happened: she was actually a victim of gang violence. I was talking to her about the kind of evidence that she can start gathering, so we can see if there’s anything I can do about the wrongful separation. She got deported—she’s from El Salvador—then came back, and has been hiding out in Ciudad Juárez. She’s been told that her kids may be going to foster care, and she’s panicking. We were leaving each other voice memos, so I read only quickly about a shooting. But I had to get going.
“It was my father’s eighty-third birthday, and the whole family was getting together at their house, on the west side. That’s where we were when the events began to unfold. When I parked, I got a message from staff members at Las Americas, and they started sending alerts about what was going on in Cielo Vista. They were asking for people to check in. That’s when it started sinking in. The rest of the day was just watching it unfold on the news. Social media was really gruesome. There was a lot of footage of dead bodies. It was hard to see so many faces, because so many of those faces are like the faces in my family, in my schools growing up, in my community. Every face was home. That’s what just shook me up . . . this was in my home.
“My parents knew what was happening, but they weren’t getting these updates like we were. They only speak Spanish. There was nothing on Univision yet. They knew something had happened, but didn’t have that sense that we had throughout the day. I said, ‘Let’s go to church.’ I take them to church every Saturday at six.
“Just as we’re leaving, I got a message from a colleague that one of my clients, who’s a hunger striker from India, was found unconscious at the ICE facility. I gave her the protocol so she could help me find which hospital he’d be at, and she started making calls for me. I’m currently representing six hunger strikers, in all. They’re protesting their detention—all of them are close to reaching a year in detention. One has actually just reached a year. They were housed this entire time in Otero [a private prison in New Mexico], but Otero doesn’t have the facilities to provide the medical care that they need; El Paso is fully equipped to provide forced hydration and forced feeding, and so that’s where they were transferred.
“The church is farther out, on the west side. My parents really like this church because there are Franciscan pastors there, and they come from Mexico. It’s a church that’s very connected to Mexico. You feel it in the congregation. They’re all Mexicans. Or Mexican-Americans, mostly first-generation. El Paso is very binational, obviously, but you can go to some places, and come in and out as you speak English and Spanish. Then there are other places where we’re just going to speak Spanish, and that’s this church. After mass was when I started telling my mother what happened. She started to put it all together. She looked at me and said, ‘I didn’t know. I know something bad happened, but it’s all been in English.’
“My parents are from Durango. My father was a bracero, and obtained legal status here. And because of a drought in Mexico, and because my father was able to go through the whole immigration process, my mother and brothers came. It was very difficult for my mom to leave Mexico; she never wanted to leave. It’s been difficult to see a woman like that, who really never wanted to be in this country, but when she was in this country she found her voice as this activist in the late sixties and seventies. She marched with Cesar Chavez and demanded rights for field workers. But she brought my whole family to El Paso from California, when she was just a fieldworker, because, she told my family, my brothers, ‘I want you guys to go to El Paso, because in El Paso people like us don’t belong in fields or in the backs of kitchens. They go to school, and we will also be near home.’ So that’s why we came. (I was born here, later.) It was the city where my mother was convinced I could become someone. And yet so many people were just targeted here! This was the place that was supposed to be the one that launches us into the future.
“I made up my mind as we were driving back that I would go find my hunger striker. There were these two loud thoughts in my mind: my mother never wanted to come to America; and, at the same time, I wanted to spend my time, especially on this day, with someone I felt was being treated as an undesirable by so many people in this country. He was at Providence, on the far-east side, and I went to him. He was a feeble lump of a body now, and I peeked through the door, and he saw me before the officers saw me. And I said ‘How are you?’ but he couldn’t even recognize me. He blinked, and looked at me and said, ‘My lawyer, I’m not O.K.’ That’s when the ICE officers looked at me—there were two of them—and they swarmed and kicked me out. They were there in the same room; even in the hospital, he was still under their custody.
“This year, I’ve felt like I’m constantly in the triage room, handling crisis after crisis, trying to find a way out. Yes, I can be reactive, but, finally, I can also be in a space where I can be proactive, and that’s what we’re falling into now, as we begin to collaborate—Las Americas—with the Mexican consulate, to see how we can right some wrongs together. We are now trying to identity direct victims, indirect victims, and bystanders, and to see if they could fall into eligibility for U-visas. It’s going to require a lot of resources to do intakes on the victims and survivors. And it’s going to require a lot of work, because a lot of them have families who are in Mexico, who would be eligible for U-visa status. We have to locate them, provide them legal care, open these cases.
“Will they want to come? It’s an open question. I always question that, and I questioned it a lot during the separation of families. I thought, Who would ever want to come to this country again? And yet they do.”
For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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