Posted August 4, 2018, 8:07 pm CDT
For Kimi Jackson, director of ProBAR—the ABA-sponsored
South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project in Harlingen, Texas—the first inkling that the government’s immigration policies had changed came when her staff members went to conduct their usual screenings, referrals and “know your rights” presentations. ProBAR traditionally serves adults and unaccompanied minors, but its staff was suddenly encountering large numbers of distraught children who had been separated from their families.
“We are very used to working with children who’ve experienced trauma in the past, but these kids were—they may have experienced trauma in the past, they may have experienced trauma during their journey, but they’d just experienced a severe trauma that was perpetrated by the government against them when they were separated from their parent,” Jackson said. “And that trauma was very fresh. And it was very difficult for our staff to work with these kids. As a director, I had to do a lot of things to give our staff the tools to work with this different population that was experiencing a trauma unlike anything we’d ever seen before.”
In the immediate aftermath of the family separation policy, the need was for an urgent response from a very specific demographic: immigration attorneys with Spanish-language skills, Jackson said. But now a much broader range of volunteers are needed and being welcomed. ProBAR is also using an influx of donations and funds to add permanent staff positions, including for attorneys. Those job listings can be found at the ABA Career Center.
ABA President Hilarie Bass spoke at the beginning of the event to reiterate the ABA’s commitment to helping address the issue and to share some of what she witnessed during a trip to Texas she made in June to meet with ProBAR and visit the Port Isabel detention center. Bass described the efforts already being made by a variety of ABA entities and urged any attorney wanting to do pro bono work on behalf of immigrant children to visit ambar.org/immigrantchild to find out ways to assist.
Bass also told the audience that she has been in talks with Lumos, an international nonprofit founded by J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter book series. Lumos is a child advocacy organization working to end the institutionalization of children, reunite families and assist children who have grown up in orphanages.
“They’re going to send social workers to the border who understand the long-term trauma that not just the children but these entire families will be facing during this reunification,” Bass said.
“The USA was one of the first countries to move away from warehousing children in institutions and towards family-based care,” Lumos wrote in a press release responding to the zero-tolerance policy and family separations. “It is essential to ensure that the evidence-based practices pioneered decades ago in the USA inform the next steps in responding to this current crisis.”
“There’s just so much work to be done,” Woltjen said. While immigration attorneys are needed nationwide, she said, family law attorneys and lawyers specializing in parental rights are also in demand. She also drew attention to the 11,000 unaccompanied children not part of the recent family separations who are in need of help to navigate the U.S. immigration system.
Fluency in a foreign language is not required for attorneys to be helpful. “We’ll take you with your linguistic skills,” Chandler said. “We have a lot of interpreters who want cases. The reality is that, as has been described, this zero tolerance is ongoing.”
During his Thursday speech at the annual meeting, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended the zero-tolerance policy, saying that “if the facts of the law justify prosecution, then we’re committing the resources to ensure everyone is treated equally rather than picking and choosing who will be prosecuted.”
In addition to the increase in people being federally prosecuted for the misdemeanor offense of crossing the border without authorization, the panelists pointed out that—although family separation has ended—many families have still not been reunified despite court orders that the government do so. Eligibility for asylum has also been narrowed by Sessions’ June ruling in Matter of A-B- to exclude victims of domestic violence and gang violence; also, individuals who would previously have been released to await immigration and asylum hearings are now being held in long-term detention. All these issues could be addressed by willing attorneys.
“To think that we’re just throwing these very vulnerable parents and children into a system that is just orchestrated for disaster is quite daunting,” Chandler said. “And here we are now, three, four months later, feeling those painful after-effects of something that—with a little bit of attention to detail or care or love or compassion—could have been prevented.”
Follow along with our full coverage of the 2018 ABA Annual Meeting.
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