Immigration Lawyers Must Deal with ?Manufactured Crisis'

• Author: L.R. and L.L.
• Pages: 67-67

Immigration Lawyers Must Deal

with ‘Manufactured Crisis’

Attorneys who’ve spent their c areers

concentrating on immigration law and child

welfare have been scrambl ing to deal with

the fallout of the Trump admi nistration’s

immigration crackdown.

Attorney General Je Sessions’ April

announcement of a zero-tolerance policy

for unauthorized bo rder crossings and the

family separations that followed seized pub-

lic attention in the spring. But some immigra-

tion attorneys and ch ild advocates noticed

the e ect of these policie s much earlier.

“We started seeing these cases in

September of 2017—the government was

separating child ren in di erent parts of the

border,” said Maria Woltjen, founder and

executive director of the Young Center

for Immigrant Chil dren’s Rights at the

University of Chic ago Law School.

But Sessions’ Apri l directive to U.S. at tor-

ney’s o ces caught many othe r government

agencies and nonprofi ts o guard.

“When zero tolerance was announced,

this was actually new n ews for the individuals

running the O ce of Refugee Resettlement

and the deportation o cers, and policies

and details were not in pla ce,” said Anne

Chandler, executive director of t he Tahirih

Justice Center’s Houston o  ce. “This was

orchestrated to be a manufactured crisis.”

Chandler and Woltjen spoke as p art of the

ABA Annual Meeting p anel “Families on

the Precipice: Navigating the Separation,

Detention, and Reunifi cation of Families

at the U.S. Bo rder,” sponsored by the

Commission on Immigration.

FIRST RESPONDERS

For Kimi Jack-

son, director of

ProBAR—the

ABA-sponsored

South Texas

Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project

in Harlingen, Texas—the fi rst inkling that

the government’s immigration policies had

changed came wh en her sta members went

to conduct their usual screenings, refer-

rals and “know your rights” presentations.

ProBAR traditionally serves adults and

unaccompanie d minors, but sta ers were

suddenly encountering large numbers of

children separated from their families.

“We are very used to working wi th children

who’ve experienced traum a in the past, but

these kids were—they may have experienced

trauma in the past, t hey

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.

“As a director, I had

to do a lot of things

to give our sta the tools to work with th is

di erent population that was experiencing

a trauma unlike anythi ng we’d ever seen

before.”

In the immediate af termath, the need was

very specifi c: immigration attorneys with

Spanish-language skills, Jackson said. But

now a much broader rang e of volunteers

are needed and bein g welcomed. ProBAR

is also using an infl ux of donations and funds

to add permanent st a pos itions, including

for attorneys. Then-ABA President Hilarie

Bass shared some of wh at she witnessed

during a trip to Texas she made in J une

to meet with ProBAR

and visit the Port

Isabel detention center. Bass urged attor-

neys wanting to do pro bono wor k on behalf

of immigrant child ren to go to ambar.org/

immigrantchild to fi nd out ways to assist.

Fluency in a foreign lan guage is not

required for attorneys to b e helpful. “We’ll

take you with your linguistic skills,” Chandler

said. “We have a lot of interpre ters who

want cases. The real ity is that, as has been

described, this zero tolerance is ongoing.”

Later during the ABA H ouse of Delegates

meeting, the House overwhelmingly voted in

favor of Resolution 119, adopting standards

on the care and treatm ent of unaccom-

panied immigrant minors, and Resolution

10C, callin g on

Congress and the

executive branch

to end the separa-

tion of immigrant

families and protect their legal claims.

Speaking on beha lf of Resolution 10C ,

former ABA President Mic hael Greco of

Boston recalled coming through Ellis Island

from Italy with his fami ly in 1950, when he

wa s 7.

“It has occurred to m e in the last few

months, especia lly in the last few weeks, tha t

I might not have been here 13 ye ars ago, tak-

ing the oath as preside nt of the ABA,” said

Greco, a retired part ner from K&L Gates.

“We were fortunate. What is h appening

in this country right now,

it is an abomination.”

—L.R. and L.L.

Uzoamaka Emeka Nzelibe, M aria Woltjen, Kimi Jack son, Anne

Chandler and Ange la C. Vigil at the ABA Annu al Meeting’s panel

“Families on the Precipice: Navigating the Separation, Detention,

and Reunifi c ation of Families at the U.S. Border.”

ANNUAL MEETING REPORT || Your ABA

OCTOBER 2018 ABA JOURNAL || 67

PHOTOS BY KATHY ANDERSON