WASHINGTON — Four legal advocacy groups are suing the federal government on behalf of women and children currently being held on immigration charges at a former law enforcement training center in rural New Mexico, as well as nearly 300 already deported from the facility.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, accuses the government of failing to allow for adequate legal representation and violating the due process rights of the women and children, part of the influx of tens of thousands of undocumented Central American migrants recently detained by U.S. personnel along the southern border. According to widespread reports, many of the migrants are fleeing chronic violence in their home countries, potentially requiring humanitarian protections from the United States if they were to file asylum claims.
But immigration and civil rights groups say the Obama administration has prejudged the migrants’ cases as a group, working on the assumption that most would be deported, rather than considering the merits of each individual’s case. Doing so, they say, contravenes long-standing legal and constitutional precedent.
The lawsuit focuses on a detention facility in Artesia, New Mexico — the first major immigration detention center set up to house women and children since the last one closed in 2009 — and the new accelerated approach to deportation allegedly being practiced there.
“This lawsuit is focused on Artesia because we are challenging the expansion of expedited removal through a specific statute that allows judicial review within 60 days of the announcement of the new program,” Paromita Shah, the associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the groups behind the lawsuit, told MintPress News.
The allegations, she says, center on “due process violations in Artesia related to the illegal expansion of expedited removal.” One of Shah’s colleagues, Trina Realmuto, has referred to the Artesia facility as a “deportation mill.”
Policy of eagerness
Federal officials were caught seemingly unprepared when more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors and other migrants arrived at the U.S. border from Central America — mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — during the first half of this year.
That was more than double the number recorded during the entire previous 12 months, even though these arrivals had been spiking since at least 2011. For weeks, U.S. Border Patrol agents were reportedly apprehending as many as 3,000 children and some women per day.
Following a massive diplomatic response from the Obama administration — which is still awaiting broader action and funding from Congress — these figures have since leveled off. According to the most recent figures from the Department of Homeland Security, the number of unaccompanied children and adults with children for July was half of what had been recorded in the previous month.
Still, domestic policy in reaction remains entirely up in the air, in part awaiting lawmakers’ return to Washington following a month-long recess. The new debate has already derailed the broader legislative push for a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s immigration system.
The situation also continues to place significant political pressure on President Obama. The president is currently coming up on a self-imposed deadline to announce a new administration approach to deportation, including potential executive actions he could take in lieu of congressional movement.
Yet, it was Obama himself who initially appeared to suggest his administration’s eagerness to begin deporting the new Central American migrants. The U.S. would take “aggressive steps to … deter both adults and children from making this dangerous journey, increase capacity for enforcement and removal proceedings, and quickly return unlawful migrants to their home countries,” the president pledged in a letter to congressional leaders in late June.
In remarks that same day, the president noted that “in most cases” the children and other migrants would be sent back home.
Within days, federal officials announced the opening of Artesia, a repurposed law enforcement training facility housing some 700 “adults with children,” according to a fact sheet from the Department of Homeland Security. Critics noted the unintended irony of federal officials announcing the opening of Artesia on June 20 — World Refugee Day.
Return of family detention
In fact, the opening of a large facility to detain women and children was already a significant change, albeit one not debated in Congress. As a matter of policy, the U.S. stopped such detention in 2009, though a small family detention center, housing some 80 individuals, has continued operating in Pennsylvania.
That broader halt took place following another lawsuit against a family detention center in Texas, an operation known as the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America. The Hutto family detention center, which housed immigration detainees between 2006 and 2009, was ultimately closed by the Obama administration following reports of systemic poor and degrading conditions, including for children.
It’s significant, then, that family detention has now come back as a model for the federal government. A second major family detention center has already opened, in Karnes City, Texas, and the Department of Homeland Security said on Aug. 7 that it was “about to open an additional facility for the same purpose.”
Further, the federal government could be taking up this model again without bearing in mind some lessons from the situation around the Hutto facility. While the current lawsuit does not address conditions at Artesia (nor does it cover the new facility at Karnes City), some involved with the action say the issue remains relevant and troubling.
“It’s impossible to disentangle the issue of rights and conditions. What we have is essentially a situation where conditions are so coercive that women are giving up their rights,” Karen Tumlin, a managing attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, part of the suit filed Friday, told MintPress.
“For instance, we heard from women describing chronic sickness due to the food at Artesia, where they say the only options for eating have included raw chicken and undercooked fish, which they believe is making them sick. They also say they haven’t been given medicines for their kids.”
Similar stories are available in declarations from nearly 20 attorneys working on the case, available here.
“No chance”
Women at Artesia have also claimed to legal advocates that guards tell them that President Obama “wants them deported,” Tumlin says, and that if they’re at the facility “there’s no chance” they won’t be deported. Critics say this likewise suggests an environment of illegal prejudgment regarding the validity of migrants’ potential asylum claims.
“Without question, these women and kids have the right to an individualized day in court. Both U.S. and international law requires that the United States do individual evaluations, and that no one be sent back to persecution or death,” Tumlin said.
“But when you have a system in which you have a top-down decision made that a group of people will be deported, that turns the legal requirement on its head.”
The lawsuit also lists a host of systemic barriers being faced by detainees at Artesia in accessing legal representation. Even when attorneys are available, for instance, they are reportedly being kept outside of questioning processes or made to leave within minutes. Other detainees have reported widespread concerns around limitations on phone use.
And the lawsuit is not focused solely on those currently or prospectively in detention at Artesia. Tumlin says that some 280 people have already been deported from the facility under what the groups party to the lawsuit allege has been an illegal system.
According to analysis by The New York Times, U.S. officials find asylum-seekers’ fears to be “credible” in some 80 percent of cases, and allow them to pursue their claims through the courts. But at Artesia, this figure has been cut in half, with just 38 percent of migrants being allowed to pursue asylum requests.
“It’s very obvious that there’s a huge due process problem there, with the manner in which the process is being run through expedited removal cutting corners with rights,” Tumlin said.
“So, the lawsuit is also requesting that those women and children who have already been removed have a right to come back and reopen their proceedings. Given these violations, some number has clearly been wrongly deported and need to have their cases judged anew.”