URGENT CALL TO ACTION:

ASK YOUR REPS TO JOIN L4GG
IN TELLING PRESIDENT BIDEN
NO MORE FAMILY DETENTION

Please take 5 minutes today to contact your representatives and senators to sign these two crucial letters to help us stop family detention:

1. Please call or email by COB today and ask your representative to co-sign this e-Dear Colleague letter being sent by over 30 of our Congress members to President Biden, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, joining our call asking for President Biden to fulfill his promise to end family detention and expand legal pathways to immigration. 

2. Please call or email today to ask your senator to co-sign this letter being led by Sen. Durbin addressed to the President opposing family detention. The letter closes tomorrow, March 23 at noon, so we'd appreciate your support in getting as many Dem Senate signatures as possible.
   
   Lawyers for Good Government and many of our partner organizations have endorsed these letters and stand behind them with all our hearts. We desperately need more signers to get the point across that family detention is unacceptable.

   Here are some more resources:

• Find your representative here: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

• Find your senator here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

• Find some good background and talking points on family detention here: https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/issues/family-detention

Once you've shared the letters, let us know and ask your friends to join us in making calls! Tag us across social media platforms and hashtag it with #nosafedetention, pointing out the American Association of Pediatrics' finding that there is no "safe" amount of detention for children.

For more on why this topic is so urgent, read the following blog post by Alyssa Morrison, L4GG’s Reproductive Justice Staff Attorney, about her experience volunteering at Karnes Correctional Center.

Earlier this week, it was announced that the Biden Administration is considering reinstating family detention as a means of managing the increase in migration that is anticipated to follow the lifting of Title 42 COVID-19 restrictions at the border in May 2023. Following the disastrous implementation of the CBP One App and the proposed implementation of the asylum transit ban, this threat to return to the days of family detention is another nail in the coffin of the Administration’s promises to uphold the dignity of migrants and restore the integrity of our asylum system. For those who look to the Administration to fulfill these promises, this news is stunningly disappointing, but perhaps no longer surprising. 

I come to L4GG as a reproductive justice policy attorney; I am not an immigration practitioner. But, I have seen firsthand the lack of humanity involved in the family detention system. Texas has several ICE detention centers. Among them is the Karnes Family Immigration Detention Center, located in a small Texas town about an hour southeast of San Antonio. As a law student participating in my school’s clinic program, I spent time working with asylum seekers at Karnes in 2017. Like other ICE detention centers, Karnes is run by the GEO Group–the private company behind much of the U.S. prison industrial complex. Any suggestion that these centers are not run like prisons, and their residents are not viewed with the same level of disregard that the U.S. famously affords the incarcerated, is controverted by this affiliation. And, the view from inside the center does little to discourage the comparison. Although, there is one noticeable difference in the residential composition: the addition of children. 

During my time at Karnes, I worked with my fellow students to help the detained women prepare for their credible fear interviews–the process by which they would begin their fight for asylum protection. In order to ‘pass’ these interviews, the asylum seeker must convince the officer that they have a fear of return that is not only credible, but is rooted in one of the protected asylum categories. In other words, even if the threat to their safety if they return home is absolute, they must fit that story into an unfamiliar legal framework, often through the use of an unfamiliar translator, in order to have a hope of obtaining relief. Their status as detainees meant that many of the women entered these interviews uncertain, weary, and stripped of any remaining sense of agency over their circumstances. It also meant that their ability to access legal assistance to navigate the process was often at the mercy of the detention center itself. 

In preparation for these CFIs, the women told us their stories. In rooms the size of a utility closet, they laid bare the details of the most delicate and excruciatingly personal moments of their lives to a complete stranger. For the mothers in the group, they were faced with the choice to have their child in the room with them, listening to the traumatic and often violent details of why they were forced to flee their homes, or to leave the child outside of the room, separated from them. On more than one occasion, their child made the choice for them, refusing to leave their mother’s side and relinquish that remaining piece of stability and safety. So, the women spoke and the children heard. And then, they were led back to their rooms by the officers–locked out of sight. 

The discretion of those detention officers was evident each day that we showed up to work at the center. Upon arrival one morning, we were admonished for having left a tissue box in one of those closet-sized rooms rather than placing it back where we found it. For the infraction of bringing tissues to a crying detainee, we were threatened with not being permitted to return to the facility to provide legal services. There was a play mat on the floor outside of the meeting rooms, for the children. And the authority of the detention officers was on full display when it was used to sharply chastise a child for rolling a toy truck off of the play mat and onto the floor. These patterns of control repeated in big and small ways throughout our time at Karnes, as we heard stories of medical care being denied to both women and children, children being treated like prisoners, and access to attorneys being arbitrarily limited.

The system of detention that we witnessed at Karnes cannot be our answer to a call for equitable, safe and effective asylum.