‘Promise of freedom’

Firm representing immigrants under fire for high fees, tactics

NEW HAVEN » Detention was bad enough, but the debt he owes, left him in tears.

Victor, a city resident who was recently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had his $15,000 bail posted through Libre by Nexus, a Virginia company that has been the subject of at least two lawsuits over its fees and marketing tactics.

Victor, who was picked up by ICE on April 26, said, though a translator, that he learned about Libre from another detainee at the Greenfield House of Correction in Massachusetts, a private prison contracted by ICE to hold undocumented persons awaiting removal hearings in immigration court. Victor is a pseudonym the Register is using

to protect the anonymity of his family.

His wife, an American citizen, speaks English, but said she cannot read or write. She said she signed the contract with Libre after being guided through it by a representative of the company on the phone.

She said she flipped through each of the 21 pages in the document and if there was a checkmark on it, she was told to put her initial there and sign the bottom.

“They didn’t literally read it to me. They kind of explained what I was supposed to do,” she said.

A different kind of bond

A bond in immigration court is different than in the state judicial system, where a person usually pays between 10 percent and 20 percent and offers something as collateral, typically real estate. In immigration court, the detainee has to raise the full amount of the bond and often doesn’t have collateral to entice a bondsman.

Libre contracts with a bail bond company, which actually posts the bond required by the court.

Libre then securitizes it by mandating that the client wear a GPS ankle monitor until his or her day in court or until they pay back at least 80 percent of the bond, after which they make arrangements on the terms for covering the rest.

The contract agreed to by Victor’s wife called for a payment of $3,880 up front.

This breaks down to $2,250 for the premium to the bonding company; $750 for a general consulting fee; and $880, split between $420 for the monthly GPS tracking and a $460 activation fee.

None of those charges goes towards paying down the $15,000 bond.

At $420 a month, the couple in the first year will have paid $8,920 for fees and the monitoring costs.

After two years, when his court date is scheduled, they will have paid an estimated $13,905 in fees, insurance and a bond premium with none of it ascribed to the bond total.

Mike Valdes-Fauli, speaking for Libre, said without them, “most immigrants would have no hope in posting bail, and would be required to stay in custody to fight their cases ... What would you rather do — sit in immigration jail or wear a GPS bracelet and pay $14 a day?”

He said they have served more than 13,000 immigrants and the average length of time their clients wear the ankle bracelet is eight months.

”Libre clients would rather be responsible for their own release, rather than have U.S. taxpayers paying hundreds of millions of dollars to incarcerate them and separate them from their families,” Valdes-Fauli said.

In one of the suits however, Nefi Flores testified that he had paid the bracelet lease for 16 months before he stopped as it was more than the amount of his bond.

The legal director of immigrant advocacy at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Los Angeles told BuzzFeed that paying the $420 for a few months while socking away money for the bond is not bad.

“But that’s going to be an extremely rare case, where someone has had the $10,000 (bond) all along,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told BuzzFeed News. “I’m aware of people who have been on it for over a year.”

Mary Elizabeth Smith, the adult education and community outreach director at Junta for Progressive Action in New Haven, said it was “no surprise, really that a private company has come up with a way to capitalize off of immigrant detainees’ desperation to get out of detention and reunite with their families.”

“What is worrisome about Libre by Nexus is that they market themselves as a religious organization that is concerned with bringing families together, when what they are doing is forcing families to incur huge costs over months and even years of ‘renting’ an ankle bracelet,” Smith said.

Interviewed in the Junta offices, Victor, 42, was asked about his present situation.

“I don’t like it,” he said through a translator. He then put his head in his hands and started to cry.

His wife, 34, said they had had an argument that day and he asked her why she had gotten him out of detention.

“‘Why didn’t you leave me in there. Now, I’m tied up with all these debts,’” she said he told her. They have been married less than six months.

To raise the money she has already given to Libre, plus other obligations, she said she sold her car and her jewelry.

She is equally strained by the debt. “I’m so stressed, my hair is falling out,” she said.

She said she has limited income because of a disability. Victor, who came here illegally 10 years ago from Ecuador, lost a month of work, which is more available in the summer.

“I haven’t paid rent (in two months.) I haven’t paid bills,” she said. Her husband also usually sends money back to family in Ecuador.

The cost of waiting

One of the suits filed against Libre is a class action out of California, brought on behalf of four named plaintiffs and 50 John Does by the firm of Tycko & Zavareeli.

It charges that the lease agreements for the GPS trackers and the lack of transparency on the total costs violate consumer protection laws and particularly impact Spanish-speaking immigrants, which covers a large percentage of the undocumented.

It says the total cost to the client is never clear and the suit claims Libre is violating California insurance laws governing who can solicit a bond.

In the standard contract, there is only one page in Spanish, which reviews five areas.

It says Libre is not affiliated with ICE; it does not make release decisions; it offers ministry services; it will charge 20 percent of the bond, a program fee and a collateral processing fee. It mentions the $880 charge, but does not say the client has to pay $420 a month as long as he or she wears the ankle monitor.

If the device is damaged or stolen, the replacement cost is $3,950. It is not supposed to ever be taken off and requires a two-hour daily charge.

Valdes-Fauli said Libre workers “orally review the contracts with our clients. Given the fact that immigrants speak many different languages ... and many still can’t read the language they speak, translating in person insures all of our clients understand the agreement.”

“It’s unfortunate that some immigrant advocates are taking a position which would mean that thousands of immigrants who can’t afford to put up collateral for bonds will languish in detention centers instead of having the option to work with Libre by Nexus,” he said.

Valdes-Fauli is president and CEO of Pinta, a marketing company.

Libre by Nexus, founded by Michael Donovan and Richard Moore, has yearly revenue of more than $30 million, according to a Washington Post interview. Donovan and Moore both have felony convictions and as such cannot be bail bondsmen, the Post reported. Donovan is also a minister.

Victor’s wife, who is the only one who signed the contract, unlike the others named in the class action suit, said she understood that the monthly GPS rate will not help the couple pay back the bond so he won’t have to wear the GPS bracelet. Her plan remains to try to pay it off as quickly as possible as her attorney attempts to get legal status for her husband.

Ana Maria Rivera-Forastieri, director of advocacy at Junta, is part of a small group that is organizing an Immigrant Bail Fund to try to start meeting the needs of immigrants in detention.

“It is extremely difficult to come up with the (bond) money in addition to also getting a lawyer,” she said.

New Haven however has some experience with this, having raised bail for many of the nearly 30 immigrants detained by ICE back in 2007, a raid viewed as retaliation for the city introducing an identification card available to everyone.

A legal clinic at Yale Law School provided much of the representation and won an unprecedented $350,000 as part of a settlement over constitutional violations.

Rivera-Forastieri said their goal is to raise $100,000 by the end of the year and so far they have helped three individuals. She said as important as getting them the resources they need, is to build a movement that they will help foster.

She said the steering committee for the fund will be looking at setting guidelines as they review each case that comes before them . She said they have gotten multiple offers of fund-raising.

Rivera-Forastieri said another difficulty in raising bail for this group is the time it takes to resolve a case. Something may be closed administratively, but the bond is not released until there is final closure. In the meantime the funds are tied up and cannot be used for the next person.

The surge of women and children who crossed the border from Central America starting in 2014, has swelled the backlog of cases waiting to have their cases heard.

As of the end of April 2017, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, said the number of cases waiting to be adjudicated was at an all-time high of 585,930. The average wait is 670 days, with some individuals in San Francisco, where there are 42,000 backlogged filings, not assigned a court date for more than five years.

TRAC is a data gathering, data research and data distribution organization at Syracuse University.

The $420 a month lease fee charged by Libre by Nexus, breaks down to $14 a day for the bracelet.

The Tycko & Zavareei lawsuit, citing court documents in a Georgia case, says Libre rents the trackers for $3 a day.

Valdes-Fauli said “the actual daily cost to monitor for Libre is more than $10 a day.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which has greatly increased its Alternatives to Detention Program, pays $4.41 daily to BI Inc., a private company, to monitor immigrants with the tracking devices required by ICE, according to a 2015 report by its Office of Inspector General.

This compares to a cost of $124 a day for an adult who is detained by ICE and $343 for a family detention, according to Detention Watch Network. It reported the detention budget for fiscal 2016 was $2.3 billion.

BI is a subsidiary of the GEO Group, the second largest operator of private prisons and immigration detention centers across the country. The immigrants monitored by BI are not required to pay for their use. The ACLU said ICE renewed its contract with BI through 2019 “under which GEO expects to generate $47 million in annualized revenues.”

The use of private prisons was scheduled to be cut back under the previous administration, but that is no longer is the case.

Smith of Junta said her Spanish-speaking clients have to depend on an intermediary at Libre to explain its program to them and they “do not entirely understand what they are signing.”

“The promise of ‘freedom’ in Libre by Nexus’ name is freedom that comes at a pretty high price,” she said.