The South Texas Family Residential Center in the small town of Dilley is a long way from the large cities in Texas and the lawyers that practice in them. But at any given time, up to 2,000 immigrant women and children can be detained there, and many need legal representation.
"In immigration court, when someone is facing deportation, they aren’t afforded a government attorney," said Erin Barbato, director of the University of Wisconsin Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. "You can have an attorney if you can afford an attorney."
Barbato and a group of nine UW law students, all women, recently returned from a week at the facility where they counseled immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. They spent 12 to 13 hours a day prepping immigrant women for their credible fear interviews that determine whether they will be able to stay in the U.S. or be deported back to their home countries.
Immigrants must go through credible fear interviews, conducted by an asylum officer, if they're seeking asylum in the U.S. to prove they have a believable fear of persecution or violence in their home countries.
The students are there to help fill a gap for legal representation.
"There's a lack of access to justice there and a lack of legal representation," Barbato said. "So that's why these volunteer attorneys are incredibly important to ensure that these women have some sort of access to justice."
About 22 volunteers, including the UW law students, saw between 90 and 100 women each day collectively during the week they were there in the end of August, she said. The number of women the volunteers saw each day didn't leave much time to get to know the women well, help them understand the process, inform them of their rights and hear their stories.
During their week there, the group was at the facility by 7:30 each morning. While it's called a "family detention center," Barbato wants to make it clear it's jail, she said.
The group was not allowed to take photos of the facility, but this image was taken near the part of the facility they worked in. Photo courtesy of Erin Barbato.
The volunteers had to go through security each time they entered the facility and weren’t allowed to bring in their phones or take pictures, Barbato said. While they aimed to spend an hour with each woman, who was often accompanied by her children, they averaged about two to three hours.
The student-led initiative has been traveling to the facility once or twice a year since 2014, but this year was much more intense than previous years due to the number of women at the facility.
"It’s incredibly intense for everyone involved," Barbato said, adding that the women often needed to stop for breaks because of the emotional toll of telling their stories that could include gang violence, death threats, domestic violence, torture and rape.
"We saw a lot of domestic violence fueled by gang violence, fueled by poverty, by a lack of resources," said Daniela Juarez, a third year law student in the group. "So we had women who were very young, who did not have access to education, who did not have access to a job and they were supporting children."
Juarez has a personal connection to the work the group was doing. She came to the U.S. with her family from Mexico when she was 5 years old.
"These are things that I think, as Americans here, we can't really imagine or quite understand, but it was very normal to them," Juarez said.
Barbato said it’s important for people to understand what is going on at the border, and the women and children making the journey are not just looking for better paying jobs.
"These women wouldn’t be making this daring trek across three or four countries if it wasn’t a matter of life or death," Barbato said.