My return to legal practice after a number of years involved in other pursuits has not gone the way I expected. Having thought I would complement my husband’s family law practice through estate planning work, I have instead found myself working again on immigration matters. It is more than fair to say that the complexion of the immigration landscape has changed dramatically in the years since I last served as immigration counsel.
This week has taken a massive psychic toll, as I lost a client to the immigration enforcement machinery. He was deported to the very country he had asked the United States to protect him from. When he was put on a plane, the immigration court’s own public case system still listed his case as pending, with his next court hearing months away.
I was denied access to my client three times, despite having appeared as his attorney of record before the government. First, the jail holding him and the ICE office responsible for him simply ignored my emails and requests. Then, after ICE moved him, I scheduled a legal visit through the government’s own scheduling system, and the facility turned me away at the appointed time, citing “facility count.” The last scheduled visit never happened at all: ICE was transferring him again at the very hour we were set to meet.
Each time ICE transferred him, no one notified me in advance. I learned where my client was from the government’s online detainee locator, which trailed many hours behind his actual movements. Days later, he was gone. I never spoke with him again. I never got to say goodbye, and I never got to ask him what he wanted.
I will not share anything here, or in the comments, that could identify my client, and I will not answer questions about his case. He is not a story. He is my client, and my duties to him did not end when the plane took off.
What happened to him is not an aberration. This week Human Rights Watch and the ACLU released a report on the largest immigration detention facility in the country, documenting beatings, life-threatening medical neglect, coercive removals, and systemic barriers to legal representation. Nor is it distant. An investigative journalist’s report published July 16 chronicles how ICE enforcement is tearing apart immigrant families here in Indiana, and local journalists have documented ICE detainee flights leaving Indianapolis multiple times each week, many of them bound for Alexandria, Louisiana, one of the country’s largest hubs for deportation flights. The investigative piece also notes that the immigration court in Indianapolis has denied 93 percent of the asylum cases brought before it this year. A Guardian investigation described the Alexandria Staging Facility, the jail on that airport’s tarmac, as a “black hole” where legal access barely exists.
As his lawyer, I can’t not bear personal witness to this. It’s happening. People in the United States are literally being disappeared. “Enforced disappearance” is the human rights researchers’ conclusion, not my exaggeration. They are human beings, with families and hopes and dreams. We need our lawyers who have seen it to say it.
This is not what I ever imagined would happen in my United States of America when I took my attorney’s oath three decades ago. Yet it is happening, in your community and in mine.
The picture is of my youngest son and me on the Fourth of July. We celebrated in the open, at ease, unafraid. That is everything my client asked this country for. If you are a U.S. citizen, do not take your independence or your civil liberties for granted. Vote, and make your voice heard.