Last month, I spent an entire week, thanks to the pro bono department at my job, in rural Georgia. A group of three of us, two lawyers from the LA and Salt Lake City offices, and me, traveled to the Columbus, GA area, and made a daily commute, forty-five minutes each way, from the hotel to a nondescript house near the highway in Lumpkin, GA. The house was the office of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southern Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI), and our base of operation for the week.
Lumpkin, GA is the home of the Stewart Detention Center, a privately-owned immigrant detention facility for men (and trans women), housing up to 1900 detainees at any given time. We were there to help SIFI screen detainees for legal representation, assist with the ongoing cases of existing clients, and observe the judges in the various immigration court hearings (Stewart Detention Center has an on-site courthouse). I was there to translate, as the vast majority of the detainees are from Latin America.
Being the interpreter meant that I spent the most time in the detention facility. Visiting detainees is a tedious and inconsistent process, with wait times ranging from half an hour to all day, depending on various factors, not the least of which was the team working the front desk that day. You are not allowed to bring your cell phone, except in certain instances to translate, and are required to put your car keys and any books you are reading in a locker before entering. They will review any legal materials you are bringing to the detainee, who is either a client or potential client, and select items to leave out in your locker, the most popular being a limit to the amount of business cards you can bring in with you.
Stewart Detention Center is a medium security prison. Legal visits are in closed booths with glass separating you from the detainees. There is a phone for communicating on either side, and a small slit at the bottom of the glass in front of you to exchange paperwork. Detainees are all dressed in prison scrubs, and can spend months, and in some cases, years locked up while they petition for a legal status in the US.
Prisoners are at Stewart because the US government has determined that they are in this country illegally. Eligibility for detention is in a sense indiscriminate, but breaks down into three main categories: 1) someone has lived here for a period of time, often years, undocumented, had an interaction with law enforcement or ICE, and it was determined that the person should be deported, 2) someone has crossed the border, usually not at a port of entry, and was caught at a checkpoint, or otherwise, by Border Patrol or ICE, or 3) someone crossed the border, usually through a port of entry, and turned themselves in to Border Patrol or ICE, in an attempt to apply for legal status.
Detainees are initially held at various local ICE facilities, aptly called “hieleros”, or ice boxes, by the inmates, often for weeks, with several transfers before being sent to a facility like Stewart. It can be months before they end up before a judge for their first hearing. The hearings begin with a list of charges read off of a document, called a Notice to Appear, that some of the inmates would have received in the mail, but many never get a chance to see. The judges speak in English, with an interpreter present to translate into Spanish, for a “defendant” who sits there bewildered with headphones trying to make sense of the process. The inmates are guilty of the charges, of course, which mainly consist of being present in this country without an approved status. They then have the option of seeking to apply for status, and to petition for bond or parole, or to submit to a voluntary withdrawal (leaving the country by their own means) or deportation. We witnessed many inmates choose deportation simply as a result of detention fatigue, and a lack of means.
Legal status can be obtained in a number of ways, and immigration law is complex and difficult to navigate. The status most people are familiar with is political asylum, which is reserved for people who have been subjected to institutional, usually government-sponsored, discrimination and abuse, and who have a credible fear of continued harm if sent back to their country. Except in very limited circumstances, a person cannot apply for asylum without being present in the US. This provides a paradox in that their mere presence on our soil is considered a deportable crime worthy of detention. Once an immigrant appears before a judge and requests asylum, he/she is provided with an asylum application form, which must be filled out, in English and in triplicate, and brought to the next hearing, usually a week or two later.
Catholic Charities has a contract with Stewart Detention Center to provide legal orientation workshops, including translating services with respect to the forms, but the demand is too high for the workshops to fill the needs of most of the inmates, and most end up at the next hearing asking for an extension. It is also important to note that the vast majority, five out of six, of these immigrants appear before a judge with no legal representation, or pro se. Some are lucky enough to have relatives with legal status who are sponsoring them and can find them immigration attorneys, but most navigate the system on their own. There are no public defenders in these courts. Judges will generally grant an extension to someone seeking asylum, or some other similar legal status, but if the following deadline is not met, the application is considered abandoned, and deportation is scheduled.
SIFI has two attorneys, a project coordinator and an administrative assistant working full-time in Lumpkin. Through trial and error, they have determined that the best method to provide help to the immigrant detainees is to represent as many as possible in their attempts to be freed from Stewart, either on bond or parole. The immigrant can then move any future immigration status hearings to other jurisdictions, which are statistically more likely to grant legal status. Of those petitioning for asylum, only 6% are granted at Stewart, versus a national average outside of these facilities of 49%. Teams of pro bono attorneys and other volunteers, like our group, rotate on a weekly basis to assist with the process under SIFI’s supervision. As one might imagine, the demand for representation outstrips the supply of volunteer and SIFI attorneys.
Although the results for immigrants that are represented by SIFI’s attorneys are predictably more favorable, when SIFI makes a successful petition for bond or parole, the immigrants must then continue the process on their own. In the examples where a bond is set, the average is $7,500, a number most of the detainees cannot afford without assistance. Judges do not take the means of the immigrant into account when determining bond, often overstating the potential flight risk. This has become the subject of a lawsuit against the USCIS by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Once SIFI takes a case, they often go above and beyond their mission of representation with respect to liberty on bond or parole. Although they don’t represent them at asylum hearings, they assist with the paperwork (I translated an asylum application when I was there), they communicate with the family to coordinate release, and even apply on the immigrant’s behalf to non-profits, such as RAICES, which can finance the bonds. The SIFI employees have dedicated themselves to justice for immigrants, invest heavily and personally in their cause, often living in areas where the political sentiment runs counter to theirs, and struggle with a system designed to default to deportation, and to make any other result remote (it is not a coincidence that these facilities exist in remote, out of sight, locations).
I was fortunate to spend a week helping them, doing what little I could with my colleagues, and I will be writing a series of articles and/or posts in the coming weeks, detailing my experience, sharing general stories, with their permission, of some of the immigrants I met, attempting to understand how we got here, and outlining ways in which any who read this, if so inclined, can provide help. I would especially like to thank my firm, Ballard Spahr LLP, for participating in the SIFI volunteer program (they have sent groups in the past are schedule to send more groups in the future), and for providing me with the opportunity to participate.
