In Rural Georgia, in Solidarity with the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative

Last week, we were freedom riders, fighting to get immigrants out of detention at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. We returned late Friday night. Our team of ILSA volunteers spent the week working alongside lawyers and staff from the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI) on behalf of immigrants detained at the Stewart Detention Center, one of the largest for-profit detention centers in the country. This was my fourth journey with students to do detention work. The other three trips were to the Karnes Family Detention Center in Texas, an hour-and-a-half from San Antonio.

In many ways, these experiences were very different: at Karnes, we spent the entire time inside the detention center. In Georgia, I shuttled teams of students back and forth to Stewart, but our home base was the office of SIFI, where we worked alongside attorneys and staff. At Karnes, we helped parents and children who had gone or were going through the credible fear screening process, to determine their eligibility for asylum. Our work was limited to preparing them for their credible fear interviews (CFIs) before an Asylum Officer (AO), drafting declarations to prepare them for their Immigration Judge (IJ) reviews, or preparing Requests for Reconsideration when the IJ affirmed the AO’s negative decision. Most of the people at Karnes had only just arrived in the United States and been placed into detention, either after presenting themselves at a port of entry, or entering without inspection. At Stewart, which is limited to men and a few trans women, we saw people at all stages of the process, from recent arrivals, to persons who had been here for years, in undocumented status, to lawful permanent residents who had committed some offense that made them deportable.

I found the work in Texas more emotionally draining, given the families who had fled in fear for their lives and then found themselves in detention, facing imminent return. Those who did not pass their CFIs were subject to immediate removal without a full hearing. Also, our trip in 2018 was particularly draining, given that we were working with fathers and sons who had just been reunited under court order after going through family separation.

For me, the experience this time was much less devastating but no less valuable. Although the students spent much of their time meeting with clients or prospective clients at the detention center, I spent most of my time back at SIFI’s office overseeing their work, or bringing them back and forth. From a pedagogical standpoint, however, this experience was arguably much more valuable for the students, who developed a range of skills, from screening clients at initial intakes, to Skyping with them through an interpreter, to preparing bond applications and parole requests, including drafting motions and letters, gathering documentation from family members and sponsors, and doing legal research. I was asked to draft an appeal of the denial of a bond motion involving a trans woman, from which I learned a great deal. In short, we all acquired new skills that we could take back with us and which were readily transferrable to other immigration contexts.

The lawyers and staff at SIFI were outstanding. Although we faced some bumps along the way, including having our free housing fall through right before we left, once we got there, everything ran smoothly, and the Airbnb where we ended up staying allowed us to escape and decompress and enjoy each others’ company each evening. At the end, we had a valuable debriefing, where we compared our experiences to a rose, where the highs were the flower, the lows were the thorn, and the possibilities for the future were the unopened bud. Several students indicated a commitment to continue to work remotely, which I hope will blossom into a new ILSA project.