For six years, I have represented adults, children and families who have fled persecution in their home countries and sought protection in the United States. My clients have traveled thousands of miles from countries including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cameroon, Togo, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. They leave their homes, communities and culture because the pain and risks of fleeing pale in comparison to the dangers they will face if they stay.
I have seen the difference between the outcomes for clients who have meaningful access to legal counsel and due process, who are able to safely settle into a community as they pursue their cases, and people who are deprived of these basic human rights. But over the past several months there has been an onslaught of Biden administration policies designed with one goal: to rapidly deport people. These programs block people from a fair asylum process, and I am deeply concerned that thousands of individuals fleeing persecution will never be able to tell their stories and have a chance at safety in our country.
For the clients I have helped win asylum, the key to my representation was consistent and thorough communication. Through multiple sessions, we built a rapport, I provided them with information about their legal rights and the immigration system and they provided me with the details of their lives. These details formed the basis of their legal claims, which I assisted them in presenting to the immigration judge. The judge decided whether they could stay in the United States based on an individualized determination of their future risk of harm if deported.
When one of my clients and her six-year-old daughter completed their two-month journey from El Salvador to Texas, Customs and Border Protection detained them for three days and then released them with notice of their obligation to appear in immigration court. They made their way to the Midwest, where they sought legal representation.
At the National Immigrant Justice Center, my colleagues and I worked with the mother over several months to document her experiences of being raped, impregnated, beaten and locked up at home by her older relative. Finally safe in the United States, she started therapy and began working at a restaurant to support herself and her daughter. At her final immigration court hearing, she bravely testified about her traumatic past, and the immigration judge granted both mother and daughter asylum.
Since last spring, my colleagues and I attempted to provide legal services to adults and families who, like that mother and daughter, fled threats and harm in their home countries, but faced very different circumstances at the border under the Biden administration’s new policies that favor rapid deportation and bar many people from the process altogether.
First, we served adult asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, who face truncated initial screenings while in CBP detention. There, the government permits only telephonic communication with attorneys.
I spoke with a man who fled Honduras because of gang threats. My goal was to assess his case, provide him with guidance on the asylum process and offer to represent him for his initial screening. After a few minutes on the phone, with my client in a cramped phone booth without paper and pencil, I learned that he already had completed his initial asylum screening before he was able to speak with me. A CBP officer had told him that he could call either an attorney or his family, and he chose his family. He did not yet know whether he had passed his initial screening.
After reviewing his claim, I offered to represent him if he received a negative determination, so we could request that a judge reconsider. Despite my efforts to inform the government that I was my client’s attorney, after he received a negative finding, the immigration judge proceeded to review his case in a hearing without me present. He was deported, having faced the full screening and review process alone.
He was not alone in facing systemic barriers to counsel.
More recently, my organization began serving families under Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s new Family Expedited Removal Program. Unlike adults, families are released from CBP custody within days of arriving in the United States. However, families have their asylum screening within a day or two of their release, leaving them with virtually no time to find an attorney. Meanwhile, ICE subjects parents to house arrest and GPS ankle monitoring, tempering any consolation that they are “released” as ICE borrows from the criminal legal system to punish and surveil migrants, even children and families.
A man, his wife and two small children came to the United States to flee persecution they had experienced in their Indigenous community and were placed in FERM in Chicago. By the time we met, the man had already failed his initial screening. The government had screened him in Spanish, a language he did not understand or read fluently. Unlike my previous client, I had a chance to appear for this immigration court hearing and avert the deportation of this entire family. But many more under FERM never even reach an attorney, making it all but inevitable that they will be deported unjustly.
With both FERM and the ongoing policy of subjecting adults to fear screenings in CBP custody, the Biden administration has created a deportation mill, subjecting families — many of them Indigenous — to proceedings so fast they can’t call a lawyer, let alone have basic interpretation services to share their stories.
Immigration legal advocates know firsthand that the real-world consequence of these policies is that people are denied due process and deported to places where they face further harm. These programs have no place in the U.S. immigration system.
Stephanie Spiro is a supervising attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
