In May 2018, Deborah Anthony spent a week hearing cases at the largest family detention center in the United States.
The women and children mostly from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras told Anthony, an associate professor in the legal studies department at the University of Illinois Springfield working in Dilley, Texas, about 75 miles from the Mexican border, horrific stories of severe domestic violence, rampant gangs who extorted money and family members who “disappeared” in their homelands.
They had presented themselves to U.S. Border Patrol agents for asylum, but even on this side, Anthony recalled, they endured threats of sexual abuse and violence. They were also called names, kicked and spat upon, they told her.
Anthony sometimes worked 15-hour days, all without pay, and watched colleagues, frazzled by the experience, go to other parts of the facility and break down emotionally.
So Anthony did the only logical thing she could do in her mind: she committed to working another week at the facility in August.
This time, Anthony will take another legal studies colleague, assistant professor Anette Sikka, whose background is in immigration law and international human rights.
Six UIS students — Graciela Popoca, Vanesa Salinas and Sonia Hernandez, all of Chicago; Maria Zavala of Carpentersville; Yuli Salgado of Evanston; and Alex Phelps of Washington — are also going on the trip and will serve as English-Spanish interpreters.
The Dilley Pro Bono Project, formerly known as The CARA Project, is a partnership among several agencies.
Attorneys, like Anthony, are helping the women prepare for the initial phase of their asylum application, called the “credible fear interview.”
It amounts to, Anthony said, hearing their stories and situations and helping them identify the parts that are going to be relevant to their cases legally.
“In order to get past the issues, we have to learn to discuss the (difficult) issues,” Phelps said. “I want to be able to get out of my comfort zone and confront these issues.”
“You can sit for 1,000 hours in a classroom,” Anthony said,” and not develop the same type of understanding from going there, talking to the people, understanding their experiences and witnessing government procedures: how (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is operating, how the detention center is operating, how the legal aspects of the asylum process work. “We’re a public affairs (institution) and we have a mission of engaged learning and engaged citizenship, and the university has been really great in helping us get this to happen.”
This story appeared in The State Journal-Register on June 23, 2019.
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