Some Families Separated at the Border Got Free Legal Aid. The US Just Cut That Contract

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Andres Mendoza Pablo said he still remembers the day in early 2018, while being held in an immigration detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border, when the officials came to take his daughter away.

“She was only 4 years old, I couldn’t give her to them. She was just starting to talk, but in our dialect. She didn’t know Spanish or English,” Mendoza, who is Mayan from Guatemala and speaks an indigenous dialect called Mam at home, said in Spanish.

After he refused to give them his daughter, Mendoza said eight officials grabbed the pair and pushed them up against a wall. Some pried his arms open while others spread his legs, and finally, his daughter was pulled from his chest and taken away screaming.

For weeks, Mendoza did not know where his daughter Catalina was or when he would see her again. When he asked the detention center officials about her, he said they’d insist that he had been detained alone and that they did not have his daughter in custody.

Through the Guatemalan Consulate, Mendoza learned that his daughter had been taken to El Paso, Texas, hundreds of miles away. It would take a total of four months for the pair to be reunited in Guatemala.

Mendoza, who now lives in Stockton, is one of the thousands of parents who were forcibly separated from their children in immigration detention during President Trump’s first term.

As part of a court settlement in an ACLU class-action lawsuit over the separations, the federal government agreed to fund legal services for those families, including help applying for asylum or temporary permission to live and work in the U.S. But legal service providers say that program, known as Legal Access Services for Reunified Families, is now in jeopardy.

Criticisms of the government’s plan

Last month, the government said it would not renew its legal services contract with Acacia Center for Justice, which expired less than 20 days later on April 30.

ACLU lawyers have argued that this constitutes a breach of the settlement agreement, and they want the courts to step in. The two sides are set to meet again in court on Wednesday.

Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is now running the program, declined to comment for this story.

In court filings, lawyers for ICE have laid out some of their plans. They said EOIR will use pro bono attorneys to “maximize efficiency in the delivery of the program services.”

During a federal court hearing in Southern California on May 15, ICE lawyers said they had already received 71 responses from individuals or organizations expressing interest in doing this pro bono work and are working to find more.

“EOIR is going about this differently. There will be more group training, more web-based programs, they are doing a lot of outreach,” said Christina Parascandola, one of the attorneys for ICE.

However, legal service providers like Sara Van Hofwegen, managing director for legal access programs at Acacia, have expressed skepticism that the government will find enough pro bono attorneys to meet the needs of the nearly 1,200 class members that Acacia and its subcontractors had helped.

“Basically, what the government is doing is they’re cutting funding from legal service providers, and then they’re turning around to the same legal service providers and saying, ‘Please take these cases for free,’” Van Hofwegen said.

Van Hofwegen also emphasized that providing quality help to immigrant families that were forcibly separated requires a level of trust with legal service providers that the federal government is unlikely to provide.

“In our consultations with folks, we ask them all about their histories. They disclose really personal things that have happened to them,” Van Hofwegen said. “It’s not realistic to expect that they would have that kind of relationship with the government that harms them, and we think far fewer people will come forward to receive services.”

Mendoza echoed that sentiment.

“I remember what the government did to me. It separated me from my daughter. The first thing they’re going to do is — this scares me — I think they’re going to deport me and my family,” Mendoza said.

Providers and clients in limbo

The legal service providers working with the reunited families said the cancellation of the contract came as a surprise to them.

“They even sent us over a statement of work, asked us for a bunch of different budgets, and then suddenly we got a notice that they did not intend to renew the program. We got that notice April 11,” Van Hofwegen said.

Despite the contract’s expiration at the end of April, some of the regional offices that were subcontracted to provide legal aid decided to continue offering their services.

One of those is the Immigration Center for Women and Children, a San Francisco-based nonprofit. Danielle Fritz, the center’s directing attorney, said her office is prioritizing cases where families have impending deadlines.

“I’d say probably about half of the people we’ve served need support with various things, whether that’s parole reauthorization applications, filing motions to the immigration court, meeting deadlines for filing for asylum,” Fritz said.

Without funding, however, Fritz said the program is unsustainable. She hopes the issue is resolved in court soon and the contract is reinstated, but in the meantime, families could miss those crucial deadlines.

As part of the settlement agreement, legal service providers helped class members with immigration applications such as those for parole, which grants them permission to live in the country for three years.

Mendoza and his family’s parole was set to expire on May 3, but he said ICWC helped them renew it.

He also hopes to use those legal services to apply for asylum on the basis of political and racial persecution.

Mendoza said he previously worked as a driver for a member of a controversial, now-disbanded conservative political party and had become a target for opponents. One day, he said, somebody poured boiling water over his small shack, scarring his daughter on her neck and chest. He also faced discrimination as an indigenous person in Guatemala, he said.

At the May 15 court hearing, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that while 414 people had parole or work authorizations that were set to lapse in May alone, EOIR had so far only connected 74 people to pro bono attorneys.

Lawyers for ICE countered that the ACLU could not point to a single case so far where the government had denied a class member services. They also argued in court filings that the settlement agreement does not obligate them to hire a contractor to help with renewing parole or work authorizations, only with the initial applications.

United States District Judge Dana M. Sabraw ultimately ordered the government to notify the ACLU within 24 hours if it detains any member of the class action or their immediate family, but ICE lawyers have requested that Sabraw rescind that order or at least give them up to 72 hours.

Sabraw has indicated that he will rule on whether the government is violating the settlement agreement during or soon after the upcoming hearing on Wednesday, and in the meantime, families that rely on these services await anxiously.

“My children were very worried because they are very attached to their school, they already have a lot of friends, they’re close with their teachers, they like school a lot,” said Maximo Hernandez Perez, another class member whose parole was set to expire in May.

Hernandez said he’s been trying to establish a life in the U.S. for decades, originally fleeing Guatemala in 1989 due to fears of being conscripted into the military.

He and his daughter, Celina, then 14 years old, were detained after crossing the border in 2017.

Border Patrol rounded them up with others that were caught, Hernandez said, and they were loaded into separate vehicles: adults in one, children in another.

Hernandez was deported, and Celina was sent to live with a family member in Florida. The pair would talk over the phone, but they would not see each other in person for almost five years.

“I told her, ‘It’s OK, daughter, it is OK. You see how we suffered [in detention], and we were there for a long time. Only God knows if one day we’ll see each other. And if not, you’re there so give it your all,’” Hernandez said. “‘Value what happened to us, I want you to behave.’”

Although the time apart was difficult and even traumatizing, Hernandez said he thanks God and the legal aid program for how far his family has come.

One of his sons graduated from high school last week, and another daughter will be heading for college soon, but by then, they will need help renewing their parole again.

Hernandez said he hopes the program is still around to offer that help.