A Letter from Meredith Linsky, Director of the ABA’s Commission on Immigration
In deep south Texas, I sat across the table from a Venezuelan asylum seeker and struggled to answer his earnest question, “[W]hy does the government want to detain me when they gave me a 5-year work permit, and I have my driver’s license?” He noted that he had entered the U.S. legally through a CBP One appointment and had an asylum case pending, but he feared that the next time he drove through the checkpoint from the Rio Grande Valley to the Houston immigration court, he would be detained, something that had recently happened to others.
The reality is that, over the last 14 months, the options facing people who had been paroled into the country under the Biden administration – and the asylum system itself – have been upended. What was once a lawful pathway to apply for asylum and other forms of relief has become a target for detention and removal. People who relied on orderly processes to enter our nation are now, only a few years later, facing expulsion.
Last week, I had the privilege of traveling with ABA President-elect Barbara Howard to visit ProBAR, a long-standing ABA legal services program in Harlingen, Texas. While there we visited an immigrant children’s shelter, an ICE detention center, La Posada Providencia, and held meetings with ProBAR staff and local immigration and civil rights attorneys. President-elect Howard came away inspired by ProBAR staff and moved by the clients and advocates she met there.
At an ICE detention center, we spoke with an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan who had been detained for 15 months, since the day he arrived for his appointment at the border and stepped foot into the United States. He told us that ICE initially processed him for release on parole, but the parole was never issued. He has been fighting his asylum case for over a year from detention. This young man wanted more than anything to know how he could get out of detention, but the likelihood of his release is highly unlikely. Today, even people who followed the rules are being prioritized for deportation, at a great cost to American taxpayers. With your support, we can continue to fight for due process rights for all immigrants and asylum-seekers.
Meanwhile, the ABA Commission on Immigration is working hard on multiple fronts to offer people facing removal direct representation, legal information and advice, and pro se assistance. Our team in Washington, DC, manages the only national hotline to all ICE detention centers in the country, answering hundreds of calls each month from people who are seeking representation, legal information, and referrals. Through our online portal at Federal Free Legal Answers we provide income-qualifying users with individual legal advice and counsel through qualified pro bono volunteers. At the Children’s Immigration Law Academy in Houston, we offer training and technical assistance to hundreds of legal services providers each year in the intricacies of children’s immigration law. Finally, along the border at the Immigration Justice Project in California and ProBAR in Texas, we support immigrants and asylum-seekers through direct representation, legal information and connection to services. The work is difficult and successful outcomes are harder to come by, but they are not impossible, and we know that in these times the simple act of accompaniment is meaningful.
I have worked in the immigration field for almost 40 years. And while I often say that the only constant is change, this change is different. It is different in that established systems are being dismantled, and the avenues left standing are more form over substance. Meanwhile, the exercise of positive discretion and humanitarian considerations have been nearly eliminated. Immigration issues are complex and impact multiple levels of society. When we simply focus on rounding up and deporting as many people as possible, without concern for due process or the impacts on families, the labor force, or communities, we all lose.