I finally arrived in Artesia at 9pm today, after a couple of flights and a 4 hour drive through high plains and semi-desert. There is very little between Albuquerque and Artesia, aside from Roswell and some cows.
Tomorrow morning at 6:45am, I'll be meeting the other volunteer lawyers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center that since June has been serving as an "family" detention facility for 600 Central American moms and their children. They were part of the recent "surge" and were apprehended at the border after fleeing their native homes in Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador.
This is Week 6 of the American Immigration Lawyer Association's pro bono project down here. Before AILA started rounding up lawyers to represent these women and their children, they had no counsel and deportations were swift and efficient. Now, immigration attorneys have begun to volunteer- usually a week of time- so the operation down here has turned into a makeshift law office of sorts and each week one attorney leaves and a new volunteer attorney steps in to carry on the cases. It's taken some brilliant organizing to make this run smoothly, but it seems to be working. Every week, policies seem to be improving to get due process to the people detained at the facility.
I expect the work down here will involve 1) Intakes with clients in Spanish to see if they are "refugees" under the asylum law, 2) Helping clients articulate their fears successfully in interviews with an immigration officer 3) Representing clients in bond hearings (arguing to an Immigration Judge that these women and children should be released upon payment of a reasonable bond so they can pursue their legal claims outside of this detention center), and 4) Representing them in claims for Political Asylum in an Immigration Court. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
I have been hearing horror stories from the lawyers OTG (on the ground) before me. I've been hearing about flagrant violations of human rights and mistreatment of the children (the average age of the children at this facility is 6.5)... about loss of dignity, about women having to recount stories of violent domestic abuse and rape in front of their children, about lack of food, clothing, medicine and respect for the inmates and crowding in close quarters. It's been described at worse than a refugee camp. But I will post my own impressions once I've been there.
The past week or so has resulted in some major media success for the folks down here. On Friday, the ACLU the American Immigration Council and the National Lawyers Guild filed a law suit against the federal government to shut Artesia down for violations of due process and other human rights violations. The NY Times covered this on Friday here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/us/us-faces-suit-over-tactics-at-immigrant-detention-center.html?_r=0. Earlier this week, NYT also published an editorial on these issues: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/opinion/at-an-immigrant-detention-center-due-process-denied.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140825&nlid=65464890&tntemail0=y. PBS has done a great job covering the "crayongate incident" at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/battle-rages-new-mexico-border-detention-center-crayons/ and the general conditions down there: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/immigration-lawyer-helps-detainees-new-mexico-know-rights/. And our group has also made the local paper as of this week: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/front+page/1481049b8cbd6c6e. It's exciting times.
If anyone is interested, this article provides some good information on why the Central Americans are fleeing:
http://theconversation.com/gangs-the-real-humanitarian-crisis-driving-central-american-children-to-the-us-30672
Stay tuned, hopefully I'll get a chance to post more tomorrow.
Megan
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