Family Detention

As the clock ticked toward mid-June, ICE quietly hinted that the agency would be reviewing the long-term custody status of detained families at Dilley and Karnes, although ICE would not share the criteria that they intended to apply in the review process.  Yet in...

B- and her six-year-old daughter just received a gift of immeasurable value: the gift of safety, of security, of freedom from fear. They had been through torment the likes of which I hope no one ever faces, but they made it through and I was privileged to help them....

Read Part 1 of this blog post. The story continues... A few days later, I got a desperate email from our local staff:  we only had two volunteers lined up for the next week.  Worse yet, one lawyer was only available for three days and the other didn’t speak Spanish. ...

I wasn’t going to do it.  It was just crazy stupid.  We didn’t have the resources.  The hearing was in 20 hours, and that just wasn’t enough time to put a case together. And yet, knowing that there were life or death consequences, how could I tell the young mother and...

I haven’t heard immigration lawyers called heroes many times before (though I know a lot who are). And I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it from a sitting member of Congress. But that’s what happened Thursday when Congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-TX)...

It was some months ago, which seems like yesterday, that volunteers representing the detained children and women in Artesia, New Mexico, were confronted with immigration judges in Arlington, Virgina who said no. There were hearings before one Immigration Judge who...

Driving out of the Dilley detention center last Friday, an awareness hung over me as certain and cloudy as the sky itself. I’d just spent the week volunteering with the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project. As we pulled onto I-35 towards San Antonio, I scanned the...

The three-year-old boy was a charmer, no question, so it was disorienting to encounter him in a detention facility in Texas. He loved being pushed in a stroller by his 19-year old mother, barely out of childhood herself. How did they get there? D- is an indigenous...

I last visited E- on Saturday, May 2nd; sadly, we met again at Karnes, the scene of all prior visits.  It was, I think, our twelfth meeting, and our first since the IJ’s oral decision back on April 13th.  E- was initially crushed by the decision, to the point where...

I was on a flight to San Antonio Sunday morning and a short while after that was making my way across open farmland to Dilley, Texas, about an hour and half southeast. For this week, I’ll be heading up a team of legal volunteers for CARA at the euphemistically named...