Tide is turning: Microsoft to provide free legal representation to undocumented minors

The Seattle Times is reporting that Microsoft, in conjunction with some powerhouse law firms, will be providing free legal representation to undocumented minors in immigration proceedings.

Partnered with some of the nation's legal powerhouses — and with actress Angelina Jolie as a spokesperson — Microsoft today launched an initiative to provide free legal help to hundreds of illegal-immigrant children who are on their own and facing deportation.

Through Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), the Redmond company and a group of law firms in nine cities will spend about $14.5 million over the next three years on an immigration legal-defense program for children, similar to a partnership Microsoft has had with local attorneys for years.

Last year, about 8,000 illegal-immigrant children with no official adult supervision were processed in immigration court. They came from all over the world — the majority from Central America — some fleeing untold horror and abuse.

Lydia Tamez, associate general counsel for Microsoft, told of two brothers, ages 3 and 5, who crossed the border with their mother but became separated from her after she was detained. The boys were found wandering the freeway, naked and begging for food.

Another local case involved a 3-year-old who became separated from her aunts in California. When she appeared before an immigration judge and was asked how old she was, she raised three tiny fingers.

Great for Microsoft! In return I vow not to call Microsoft the evil empire or otherwise malign them for two months.

Delivering Child while Shackled, Baby Removed, Father Barred

She had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time...The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital

Human Rights Organizations have condemned the tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including the raids by ICE, the discriminatory enforcement by local officials and the conditions of detainment amongst other human rights violations. One especially ugly aspect of ICE’s war on immigrants is a program called 287g which promotes local enforcement of immigration by law enforcement officials who are neither trained nor equipped to enforce Federal laws. Worse, many of these local officials often exhibit anti-Latino bias which leads to profiling and harassment of the Hispanic community. One such egregious example of local enforcement run amok, but not in any way isolated, was reported in the New York Times.

It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

She was stopped on July 3 in her husband’s pickup truck by a police officer from Berry Hill, a Nashville suburb, initially for “careless driving.” After Mrs. Villegas told the officer she did not have a license, he did not issue a ticket but arrested her instead. Elliott Ozment, Mrs. Villegas’s lawyer, said driving without a license is a misdemeanor in Tennessee that police officers generally handle with a citation, not an arrest.

So when Mrs. Villegas went into labor on the night of July 5, she was handcuffed and accompanied by a deputy as she was taken by ambulance to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. Cuffs chaining her foot to the hospital bed were opened when she reached the final stages of labor, Mrs. Villegas said.

The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital on July 7 as she returned to jail, she said.

As Mrs. Villegas left the hospital, a nurse offered her a breast pump but a sheriff’s deputy said she could not take it into the jail, Mrs. Villegas said.

Such treatment of non-criminal immigrants is unfortunately all too common under ICE’s war of attrition against undocumented immigrants. I can hear the nativists trolls scream “but she was here illegally!” Whether she was here illegally or not, such treatment is not only undeserved but its wide-scale application demeans our society and the values for which this Republic stands. We continue to fritter away any moral basis for criticizing the human rights violations of other countries. We have reduced our values to the lowest common denominator, the racists who rant on about “illegals” who “have no rights.” Who is next?

Download: Your Rights If Your are Detained by Local Law Enforcement

Seattle University Law school Study Documents Immigrant Detainee Abuse

As reported in yesterday’s post The Seattle University School of Law in collaboration with OneAmerica has released a study documenting detainee abuse at the privately run immigrant detainment facility in Tacoma, Washington. The study is entitled “Voices from Detention: A Report on Human Rights Violations at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma Washington.” Eristic ragemail has previously posted on detainee abuse, which you can find here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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New Report Details Abuse at Privately Run ICE Detention Center

A new report by Seattle University finds widespread abuse of detainees at the Tacoma, Washington Detention Center. The 65-page report, "Voices From Detention,"examined the treatment of detainees at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. According to the Seattle Times:

Six immigrants being flown by federal authorities to Alabama last summer were denied the use of bathrooms for seven hours and forced to sit in their own excrement, according to a new report by the Seattle University School of Law.

In the report, detainees told researchers about one man — a mentally ill Cambodian — who they say was punched by U.S. marshals and later struggled to breathe after a hood was put on his head during the cross-country flight.

The report's findings, released during a news conference Tuesday by the law school's human-rights clinic in collaboration with the immigrant-rights group OneAmerica, is intended to draw attention to conditions at the privately run Tacoma facility.

The findings come as immigrant detention has become the fastest-growing form of incarceration in the U.S., the study's authors noted.

Gwynne Skinner, a visiting professor from Willamette University College of Law in Oregon who oversaw the study, said the alleged conditions violate international human rights.

New York Times Opines on Travesty and Shame Following Postville Raid

The saddest procession I have ever witnessed

As we recently posted, following the ICE raid at the meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, immigrant workers were herded into kangaroo style hearings where they were railroaded into pleading guilty to criminal offenses. A courageous interpreter, Erik Camayd-Freixas, came forward and exposed the lack of any semblance of due process in these summary proceedings. From Dr. Camayd-Freixas account:

On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid –officials boasted– was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.” At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about. The investigation had started more than a year earlier. Raid preparations had begun in December. The Clerk’s Office of the U.S. District Court had contracted the interpreters a month ahead, but was not at liberty to tell us the whole truth, lest the impending raid be compromised. The operation was led by ICE, which belongs to the executive branch, whereas the U.S. District Court, belonging to the judicial branch, had to formulate its own official reason for participating. Accordingly, the Court had to move for two weeks to a remote location as part of a “Continuity of Operation exercise” in case they were ever disrupted by an emergency, which in Iowa is likely to be a tornado or flood. That is what we were told, but, frankly, I was not prepared for a disaster of such a different kind, one which was entirely man-made.

Echoing what I think was the general feeling, one of my fellow interpreters would later xclaim: “When I saw what it was really about, my heart sank…” Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepad in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly lliterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí…), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and mbarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their Guatemalan or Mexican nationality, which was imposed on their people after Independence, they too were Native Americans, in shackles. They stood out in stark racial contrast with the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court. Sad spectacle” I heard a colleague say, reading my mind. They had all waived their right to be indicted by a grand jury and accepted instead an information or simple charging document by the U.S. Attorney, hoping to be quickly deported since they had families to support back home. But it was not to be. They were criminally charged with “aggravated identity theft” and “Social Security fraud” —charges they did not understand… and, frankly, neither could I. Everyone wondered how it would all play out.

“The saddest procession I have every witnessed,” strong words from an interpreter who regularly translates for the so-called Department of Justice and has seen his share of tragedies. From the New York Times editorial of July 13, 2008:

Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.

What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.

“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”

He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”

No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.

Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.

And so another sad chapter is written in this administration’s contemptuous view towards the rule of law and the rights of human beings. Shame! Shame! Shame! Contemptible bastards: ICE, Justice and the U.S. Attorney.

Criminal Proceedings in Agriprocessors Raid in Postville, Iowa

On May 12^th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the Kosher meat-packing plant in Postville Iowa, detaining approximately 400 undocumented immigrants. Since then controversy has swirled around the raid and its aftermath. New America Media is reporting that “[n]o fewer than seven federal and state agencies are coordinating on investigations of Agriprocessors.”

According to lawyers in the case and agency representatives, there are likely to be civil charges related to immigration, wage enforcement, safety and other labor issues which usually result in fines, however, criminal charges related to immigration, child labor and sexual harassment and assault are far more serious and potentially wide reaching. Anyone with “knowledge or intent” of child laborers for instance is subject to criminal prosecution — in theory this could include management, human resources representatives and owners alike.

“ICE knows this case is huge,” said Sonia Parras Konrad, an attorney representing many of the women and children detained in the raids. “This is not about a few undocumented jumping the fence, this is about the ongoing crimes and abuses that these people endured. This will be a real showcase of what can go wrong without a real comprehensive solution to immigration.”

In contrast, The New York Times is reporting that a translator used during the raids has become a whistleblower in what appear to be railroading of immigrants who have been forced to plead guilty to criminal charges. Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, and an interpreter for the Federal Courts, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

So it appears that for the immigrants caught up in the raid it is a lose-lose proposition. ICE could easily deport the workers, who are unlikely to make a return, given the hardships involved in emigrating from Central America. Instead, ICE wants to score a PR coup by convicting as many workers as possible of crimes such as Social Security fraud (albeit who this harms is questionable given that they are contributing money to the Social Security fund that they will never see). Nothing like shooting fish in a barrel.

Detainee Deaths lead IG to conclude that ICE needs to account for its treatment of immigrants

A special review of immigration detainee deaths by the Federal Inspector General has concluded that ICE, the agency in charge of immigrant detensions, has been lax in reporting detainee deaths. Recent reports have brought to light the malignant state of medical care given to immigration detainees. Worse still, is the failure of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in reporting or covering up deaths of immigrants while in detention by ICE or private contractors. As reported by the The New York Times.

The federal immigration agency should report all deaths in detention promptly, not only to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, but also to state authorities where required by law, the inspector general has recommended after a “special review” of the deaths of two immigrant detainees.
Congress, advocates for immigrants and the news media have highlighted the lack of systematic accountability in such cases, and documented problems with the medical care provided in the detention system, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities.

That inspection, by the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, also found that only 11 of 20 detainees with chronic conditions were regularly scheduled for chronic care clinics, and that its policies did not fulfill requirements to notify the Homeland Security Department — the system’s parent agency — or the Justice Department of deaths.

International and domestic human rights groups have called on ICE to account for the poor treatment of detainees, especially as it concerns medical care. Among, the human rights groups condemning ICE are Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, Asian human rights groups and Human Rights First, amongst other human rights groups.

Eristic ragemail has previously posted on specific cases of medical neglect and death by ICE and its private contractors.

Human Rights Groups Condemn ICE Detentions

Human Rights Watch and Partner Organizations Submit Brief Detailing Rights Violations Committed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

In an Amici Curiae Brief filed in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Human Rights Watch and a number of other organizations provide profiles of individual cases that illustrate the unconstitutional nature of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) detention scheme. These detentions can last months or years, and often result in a detainee being placed in an ICE facility thousands of miles away from their families and communities. In many cases, such detainees have a viable claim against removal, yet are forced into the position of choosing between remaining indefinitely detained while pursuing that claim—which may take years—or simply accepting removal to a country with which they may have no meaningful connection or where they have a legitimate fear of persecution and torture.ICE claims that the majority of removal cases are completed in an average of 45 days, and that when detentions run longer than that period, it is typically because the detainee is asserting a claim that is “unlikely to succeed.” However, the Brief offers examples of specific cases where individuals pursuing a legitimate claim have been detained for periods far longer than that. Among others, these examples include individuals who were subjected to prolonged detention due to administrative errors, or who were forced to spend years in locations far from their families despite the eventual success of their claim.
You can read the full brief here.

Excerpts from the brief:

Adil Mohammed endured a year and a half of immigration detention before an immigration judge recognized his U.S. citizenship. A refugee of the Ethiopian civil war, Mr. Mohammed was born in a Sudanese refugee camp and admitted to the U.S. as a refugee in 1982.

The key issue in his case was whether his parents had naturalized as U.S. citizens before Mr. Mohammed’s eighteenth birthday, rendering him a derivative citizen. ICE delayed Mr. Mohammed’s initial proceeding for a year while
translating his birth certificate, finally producing an incorrect translation that placed his birthday eight months earlier than the actual date due to an
erroneous transposition of the month and day. Mr. Mohammed was
finally released when an immigration judge recognized ICE’s translation
error and pronounced him a U.S. citizen.

Samuel Ankrah came to the United States from Ghana as a young childand derived citizenship through the naturalization of his mother.
In 2005, however, he was placed in removal proceedings, and the immigration judge denied his claim for citizenship based on an erroneous interpretation of the Ghanaian law of legitimation. In order to vindicate his client’s citizenship rights, it was necessary for Mr. Ankrah’s attorney to gather letters from a Ghanaian attorney, a report concerning Ghanaian law from the Library of Congress, decisions of the Ghanaian Supreme Court, and a Ghanaian family law treatise. On the basis of this evidence, a district court judge recognized the immigration judge’s error and determined Mr. Ankrah to be a United States citizen. Although detained for two years, Mr. Ankrah was never afforded a hearing to determine if his prolonged detention was justified.

Armando Vergara Ceballos entered the United States legally when he was eight years old and naturalized in 1996. At some point in the subsequent decade, he misplaced his naturalization certificate. Despite his status as a naturalized citizen, Mr. Ceballos is currently in immigration detention while removal proceedings are underway against him on the basis of a robbery conviction. He has repeatedly protested to the immigration judge that he is a U.S. citizen, a fact of which the government should have a clear record. At his third hearing before the immigration judge, the ICE attorney admitted that Mr. Ceballos’s “permanent file is lost.” He has remained in detention for five months while the government attempts to recover the files it has misplaced.

Another Detainee Death in Federal Custody

The Seattle Times is reporting that prominent renowned Asian-antiquities expert, Roxanna Brown has died while in detention at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Washington. The circumstances regarding her death remained unclear as do most detainee deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) detention. According to a story in today’s Seattle Times:

A renowned Asian-antiquities expert, indicted in Los Angeles in connection with a federal investigation into illegal trafficking of pilfered Southeast Asian art, died early Wednesday morning in the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac.

Roxanna Brown, 62, the director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand, was found dead about 2:30 a.m., said Federal Detention Center spokeswoman Maggie Ogden. She was arrested last week in Seattle, where she was scheduled to speak at the University of Washington.

An autopsy was performed by the King County Medical Examiner's Office on Wednesday, although the results were not immediately available. Brown's brother, Fred Brown, of Chicago, told The Associated Press that her death was due to an apparent heart attack.

Fred Brown said his sister maintained she was innocent, and he blamed the stress of her arrest for her death. "She wasn't in good health to begin with, but they definitely brought on the heart attack," he said.

A profile of Professor Brown is available at the web site for the UCLA Center for Southeastern Studies. Roxanna Brown was described by UCLA art historian Robert Brown as "one of the two or three people who created the field of Southeast Asian ceramics." Roxanna Brown's special interest is the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, high points of Asian plate and vase making arts. Already well-known for her 1977 book The Ceramics of South-East Asia, Their Dating and Identification, she described how she became interested in the cargoes of ship wrecks.

Chalk up another death in Federal detention. Her family asserts that the death was due to a lack of appropriate medical care. Let’s see if the Feds provide enough information to ferret out the truth.

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Follow up on ICE Death by Detention

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights.

We posted two days ago on the deaths of detainees in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We highlighted a New York Times article which described the horrible death of Boubacar Bah, who was incarcerated for an administrative violation. According to The New York Times, the head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.”

Representative Lofgren cited the case of the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant, despite his pleas and doctors’ recommendations. By the time he received the treatment he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have metastasized penile cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.

He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and died on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical negligence in the case last month.

On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, The New York Times published an editorial which accurately portrayed the Kafquaesque nature of the ICE detentions.

NY Times Editorial Death by Detention May 6, 2008

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.


Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

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