Reunited migrant families face hearings, uncertain futures
DILLEY, Texas — Inside America’s largest immigration jail — where women and children can take yoga and Zumba classes while fighting speedy expulsion from the United States — the fuzzy outline of a blackrobed judge appeared on a giant plasma television.
“Let’s bring the ladies out,” immigration Judge Robert Powell ordered from the screen like a reality-show host, sitting 270 miles away in a courtroom at a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas.
Nobody could find a Mam interpreter for a Guatemalan woman who spoke that Mayan language.
So Powell’s docket dwindled to Mirian, a mother from El Salvador who lost her asylum bid during the frenzied weeks after the Trump administration separated her from her daughter and was seeking another chance.
But she couldn’t see Powell’s face. “It’s blurry,” said her lawyer, Shalyn Fluharty, who asked that her client’s last name not be used for her safety.
“I’m afraid that there’s nothing we can do on this end,” Powell said.
After President Donald Trump’s experiment in criminally prosecuting all adults who crossed the border illegally, the fate of hundreds of reunified families has come to this.
Parents who were ordered deported are pleading for a day in immigration court.
Several lawsuits are pending in federal courts over the separated families, and U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw — who ordered them reunited — has imposed a temporary ban on their deportations, which he reaffirmed Thursday. But much uncertainty remains.
As the lawsuits proceed, parents and children are pondering what to do if deportations resume in the future. If the parent has a deportation order and the child does not, should they agree to be separated again?
“The stakes are life-and-death for many of these families,” said Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who is leading the main lawsuit in the case.
The majority of children taken from their parents as a result of Trump’s zero tolerance policy have been reunited with family members.
But 700 to 800 parents and children are being held together in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family detention centers.
As Mirian did the other day, these parents could ask an immigration judge to review the asylum officer’s decision.
“That’s what we’re fighting for: For every family to have a fair day in court,” said Katy Murdza, advocacy coordinator for the Dilley Pro-Bono Project, which offers legal aid to migrant parents and children.
The Trump administration said earlier this year that migrants must show that their home government is helpless to protect them to qualify for asylum based on fears of what Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called “private” crimes. A separate lawsuit challenging the change in criteria is pending in Washington.
Mirian, 34, faced the pixelated screen in the immigration courtroom at Dilley and told Powell that she had blown her initial interview with an asylum officer because she was distraught about being separated from her teenage daughter. They had escaped gang members in El Salvador who had threatened their lives. Once in the United States, her daughter was sent to Washington state. They were apart for 48 days.
In an interview, Mirian described crying on her bed in an immigration jail in Texas when she was called to the phone to speak with the asylum officer. Her lawyer said she has since been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.
“My head was not in the right place,” she told Powell, explaining why her testimony to the asylum officer may have seemed inconsistent.
Powell, an Obama-era appointee, has denied 80 percent of the asylum cases he has heard in recent years, according to Trac, a Syracuse University organization that compiles databases on immigration courts.
On this day, he told Mirian his role was only to review the “legal sufficiency” of her asylum interview. It wasn’t a hearing.
He said she had told the asylum officer that she came to the United States for her daughter’s benefit, not her own.
She also had been deported before, in 2015, he noted. This meant she could not qualify for full asylum,
To Mirian, he said: “You are expelled from the United States.”