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Looking at 2019 - in gratitude

by Bridget Cambria and Jackie Kline, Co-founders

November 2019

The mountains of work ahead of us hardly leave any time to look back at the work we have already done, all the happy endings we have witnessed. The good outcomes that still happen and are even more gratifying these days. 

Since April of this year, we have successfully obtained relief, most often asylum, in 28 cases for men and women from Venezuela, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Jamaica and other countries. 

Most of these clients are detention survivors, and all of them received our services absolutely free of charge. 

We have represented over 50 persons, including families with minor children, in bond and/or parole matters.  We have also assisted in the start up of a bond fund for York County Prison with a local religious group, and have coordinated with RAICES and Freedom for Immigrants to provide funds to pay bond, which are the only way to freedom for detainees at York County Prison who are unable to afford exorbitant bond amounts. 

Our jurisdiction is by no means simple or inviting for most attorneys, but it is clear that in our first year on the ground in York we have earned the respect of the Immigration Court and the facility. Additionally, we have now been officially recognized by the EOIR as a listed pro bono service provider for the York and Philadelphia jurisdictions, including the Berks County Residential Center. Please see: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/file/ProBonoPA/download.

Additionally, we have been able to expand on our federal litigation work. 

Despite being a new and small non-profit with limited resources, Aldea attorneys currently have several cases pending before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Without counsel, taking a matter to the Circuit Courts is nearly impossible. However, in the current climate and in certain instances, detainees must seek review from a court outside of the immigration system to receive a proper review of their case. 

Aldea’s cases pending before the Third Circuit include (1) the case of an HIV+ Ecuadoran man who is seeking to remain in the US with his 12 year old daughter; (2) a LGBT Honduran man wrongfully denied asylum before the Immigration Court and (3) a 19 year old female political youth activist from Nicaragua. 

While working on these cases, we also found an extraordinary community. 

Our community is so generous, they open the doors to their homes to our most vulnerable clients when they need help to overcome the aftermath of incarceration. Our community is so committed to seeing families free from detention, they walk hours in all kinds of weather just to start conversations with voters about our local government’s role in immigrant punishment. Our community is so passionate about protecting asylum, they have gifted our clients hundreds of hours of free legal work, mental health care and accompaniment. We are grateful.  We hope this season renews in all of us the courage to challenge intolerance and the hope in welcoming the stranger. We hope it inspires our leaders to embrace the tradition of protecting those in danger, to offer them hospitality, to treat them with dignity. 

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For the second year, the brilliant students at the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic visited Berks for a week of service. We are in awe of the amazing work that they did in preparing and supporting our clients, and making them feel welcome despite all the roadblock imposed by this hostile administration. The Clinic’s efforts in documenting conditions of detention, and their work on critical administrative complaints have provided our organization with the necessary tools to heighten our advocacy on behalf of Aldea’s families, including tiny babies as well as teenagers who have endured the worst of this system. 

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Village Victories!

by Alyssa Kane, Managing Attorney, Aldea Detention Project. November, 2019 "My second full asylum hearing ever was one half of a couple who had, serendipitously, both been detained at the York County Prison. EM and FR are gay men from Honduras who fled together after their families' found out about their relationship, and because of their love, threatened to kill them. They entered the United States together but, because they could not legally marry before arriving here, were processed separately for their asylum claims. We dubbed them the "Honduran Lovebirds." Through pure chance, both were assigned to have their asylum hearings before the same Immigration Judge, Judge Behne, but the catch was that EM's hearing was scheduled for over 2 months before FR's. We met EM and FR less than a month before EM's hearing. Through the diligent work of a number of student volunteers, we managed to get enough evidence together to submit barely a week before the hearing was held. Judge Behne ultimately granted both men asylum from Honduras on the basis of their LGBT status, and they are now together and are building their forever life in Texas. While I have had the opportunity to represent a number of people who have fled Cuba, YP was the first woman I ever represented. While there are a significant number of women held in ICE detention at the York County Prison, the majority are men, and that is reflected in the requests we get for assistance. We were contacted to assist YP by a woman from a local volunteer group who had been visiting with her and who was concerned that, less than two weeks before her final asylum hearing, YP still had not found an attorney willing to help her. YP is a very spirited woman who took an active role in her case. She and her husband, LC, had fled Cuba because of the political oppression and persecution they experienced at the hands of the Communist regime, which included arbitrary detention, beatings, and in the case of YP, attempted rape. YP and her husband were separated when they legally sought asylum at a Port of Entry into the United States: she came to York, while her husband was sent to a different prison in Louisiana to await proceedings there. Immigration Judge Garcy granted YP asylum and YP is now living with her U.S. citizen sponsor in Kentucky. We are now working to reunite her with her husband, who remains detained - even though when YP was granted asylum here in PA, her husband was also granted as a derivative."

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#FreeMaddie! "Every child has the right to be with their family and to be happy." - Maddie's Mom. We are asking for Maddie's immediate release so she can be happy, together with her Mom and her Dad.  

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Our young 6yr old client and her father fight for a child’s right under the law to be in the least harmful environment possible at least while the child goes through her legal case. They are the longest held family in a family detention facility in the country - and they shouldn’t be. Mom is anxiously waiting for them with open arms in their family’s home in New Jersey. 

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For years, our organization has brought to light the hurtful issue of kids being separated from their parents and taken to prison.  “ICE does not have to take this family and split them up and put them in an adult jail,” said their lawyer, Bridget Cambria, of ALDEA — The People’s Justice Center. “They have absolute discretion. … They easily could have made an exception for this young man.”

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Our client and her child survive an unlawful deportation attempt <3

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This boy was separated from his father - he was deported. He doesn’t know yet that his Dad won’t be home when he finally arrives there. As he was going through the airport gate, all we could think was how soon his heart would break to find out his family will never be the same. This Mom was separated from her husband, her life partner and co-parent, left all alone to protect this beautiful, super smart boy. She was assaulted and imprisoned with that boy for over a month. And even on her worst days, this Mom found the courage to protect other families like hers. And she saved her own.

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Aldea responds to the latest tactics, such as the Remain in Mexico program (MPP) taking whatever steps necessary to ensure they survive these tactics, and that our clients have a meaningful opportunity to be heard.  “A Guatemalan father and daughter were being held by kidnappers in Ciudad Juarez at the time of their U.S. hearings in early July but were ordered deported because they didn’t show up to court, according to court documents filed by their lawyer, Bridget Cambria, who said she was able to get their case reopened.”

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Bridget Cambria, an attorney and executive director of ALDEA, said the longest-detained family at Berks currently has been there for 54 days. She said federal immigration officials routinely flout the 20-day standard.

“It’s not a campus. It’s a jail,” she said. “If you describe it as a campus that denotes you can leave. You can’t leave Berks.”

She said families have no privacy in rooms that hold six people with a bathroom shielded by a sheet. Families have to wake up when their told to, eat what their told to, and don’t get to make personal decisions about medical care.

“Those decisions are made for them,” Cambria said.

When children run in the facility, “they’re yelled at,” she said. “It’s a facade. It’s a way to make detaining children look good.”

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June 10, 2019 - Aldea is grateful for the support of the UConn Immigration Clinic, an excellent team of advocates led by Professor Valeria Gomez <3  “Last week, we took a UConn team consisting of 2 asylum clinic professors, 3 volunteer attorneys, 3 interpreters, 2 clinical social workers, and 2 professors from our human rights institute to volunteer with ALDEA - The People's Justice Center in Pennsylvania. We volunteered at the Berks Family Detention Center and the York County Prison.At Berks, our government holds parents and children who are waiting to take a credible fear interview to see if they can have a shot at putting together an asylum claim in immigration court. Our student/lawyer teams helped these families prepare for their interviews and then represented them at the interviews. Another put together an entire motion to reopen for another family that was ordered removed in their absence. They also witnessed the callous way that we incarcerate children, the agency stripped from parents, the hypocrisy of an institution that refuses to call itself a jail, even when it so obviously is, and the obstructionism of these detention centers, which instituted new bogus rules while we were there just to limit our ability to represent these parents and little children. They fell in love with the families they helped and became angry when they witnessed, first hand, what we were willing to do to these children.Our other groups went to York County Prison. We had a team of four doing intakes for Aldea, taking the time to hear dozens of stories from traumatized asylum-seekers, some who for the first time were telling their story to someone who wanted to help. It took incredible strength for our students and attorneys to work through all of these stories. But they did so in a way that respected the dignity and stories of the people they served, and their thorough information gathering helped Aldea immensely.Two other groups put together entire asylum evidence submissions for people detained at York and waiting for their asylum hearing. These people are somehow expected to either find and pay for an attorney (while detained) or put together an entire application, with witness and expert testimony and country conditions research on their own (while detained). ALDEA found these individuals and assigned them to our student-lawyer teams. Our mental health evaluators did evaluations of those clients that we thought needed them, and they also helped us debrief and take care of ourselves on this trip.My team in particular represented a couple, two gay men who fled Central America and whose love story essentially made us believe in love again. We are convinced that their story could be a screenplay. They suffered immensely to reach the US, so that they could love and live openly, freely, and without fear of being raped, dismembered, or killed. Neruda, Shakespeare, and Rumi have nothing on one of my clients, that spoke so majestically about his love for his partner that it brought us to tears. At the end, he thanked us so beautifully that it brought us all—client, two law students, an amazing recent college grad interpreter, and one Ice Queen Law Professor (me) to ugly crying tears. It was a life-changing moment, and career defining for some.Despite how much we worked (some of us worked until around 4 am to finish the work on the last night), it was hard for us to leave. But I just want to say how proud I am of these law students that came back during summer break and deferred summer job start dates, these incredible young Latina college student interpreters who took a week of vacation from their jobs to volunteer with us, our selfless, brilliant, mentoring volunteer attorneys who took a whole week out of their crazy schedules to help us supervise the project, the clinical social workers, who helped us process what we were witnessing and did evaluations with our clients, and our human rights institute professors, who helped us immensely by pumping out organized, detailed country conditions research for us to use in support of our asylum applications and credible fear interviews.I could not be more proud to be a clinical teacher or a part of the UConn family. This has been an experience I’ll never forget. A special thanks to ALDEA, a very small nonprofit that is almost entirely volunteer run, who is doing BIG things so that asylum-seekers can be treated fairly, with dignity, and with love. These women are moving mountains, and I am so glad to have worked with them.” 

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Bridget Cambria, an attorney at the nonprofit Aldea, which represents immigrants in a Pennsylvania-based family detention center, said families are regularly detained for longer than 20 days and, in some cases, up to 700 days.

Even if the government adopts an official policy of holding families for 100 days, Cambria said, it wouldn’t deter people who are fleeing extreme violence in Central America.

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Advice from one of our former clients, whose young daughter was sick with a stomach bacteria for almost the entirety of her time at Berks - which was close to two years.

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Carol Anne Donohoe, an attorney with ALDEA-The People’s Justice Center, who represents Berks families, characterized the situation at Berks as “completely abhorrent,” and she is “confused” as to why officials allow the detention center to continue operating.

“Counties all over the country are severing their contracts with ICE, but that’s not happening here,” Donohoe said. Berks County “has actually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight this licensing issue so that it can continue detaining families.”

Donohoe has filed countless complaints with Berks County officials and child welfare services, hoping someone will use their power to “aggressively investigate violations” at Berks. But the family detention center almost seems “indestructible,” the attorney said, and her clients characterize it as “a hopeless place,” she said.

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In 2015 family detention was permanent. We offered representation to every family in the Berks Family Detention Center. One of those fathers was a Syrian dad with his daughter. He won asylum from inside that prison after more than six months of detention.

Now resettled here in the US, he is still a computer engineer and his daughter is at a University.

They were always a separated family. This dad’s wife and other very young daughter and stepson were trapped in Syria. Unable to reunite because the US stopped processing many visas from Syria, and dad could not return.

Now four years separated, his wife and children have remained in Syria. The kids’ schools were bombed. They live in danger every day.

This week, however, they received the call. That after four long years, visas have been approved for his wife, his daughter and his stepson. They will be reunited after detention, separation, fear and war - they will be a family again. Thanks to everyone who supported this family - from those at Aldea, those at Human Rights First, and the Shut Down Berks Coalition.

He and his daughter were featured in the Human Rights First video below. We are honored to update that they will have a happy ending!

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Aldea and nationwide allies work hard to secure permanent lawful status for clients who have survived various forms of persecution including domestic violence, severe forms of trafficking and child abuse, giving them opportunity to heal from detention and move on to a better life. Aldea represented the family featured in this article throughout their several months in detention. 

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https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2018/06/inside-berks-americas-oldest-child-migrant-detention-centre