MoProBono Fall 2018 Newsletter

6 MoProBono Fall 2018 MOFO PRO BONO TEAMS RECONNECT SEPARATED FAMILIES AND COUNSEL DETAINED IMMIGRANTS Morrison & Foerster received an urgent message in August from the Immigration Justice Campaign seeking volunteer Spanish-speaking lawyers to travel to El Paso, Texas, to assist with the crisis resulting from the federal government’s decision to try to discourage family migration from Central America by separating parents and children. MoFo attorneys responded to the call. Thus far, those lawyers have reunited two girls with their fathers, arranged for communication between another father and son who hadn’t spoken in months as a result of their detention, and prepared numerous detainees for possible credible fear interviews (CFIs) or reasonable fear interviews (RFIs) that will determine their ability to pursue asylum in the United States. Reuniting Families Flying into Texas and Georgia, Alexis Amezcua, Lauren Bennett, Justin Fisch, Andrew Kissner, Julian Radzinschi, Erica Richards, and Claudia Vetesi visited detention centers in some of the most remote and desolate areas in the United States. For Alexis, a MoFo litigation partner based in San Francisco, the effort included sitting for hours in a rental car in a parking lot outside the Otero County Detention Center in New Mexico in temperatures hovering around 100° Fahrenheit. From that car, she tried to effect the reunification of a Guatemalan detainee named Jorge with his 14-year-old daughter, Nely, using only her MoFo Wi-Fi hotspot and her cell phone. Alexis, her fellow litigation partner Claudia, and Lauren, an associate, had driven to New Mexico after flying into El Paso, Texas, to meet with detainees who they and other members of the MoFo team would represent. The mother of two very young girls herself, Alexis describes how daunting it was having Jorge’s reunification with his barely teenaged daughter riding on Alexis’s ability to reach the right person in an intensely bureaucratic system. “I was knocking on the doors of offices at that New Mexico detention center, trying to get more information about whom I should be calling. It felt like I was being passed from bureaucrat to bureaucrat,” Alexis says, adding that she had to arrange for communication between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was responsible for detaining Jorge, and the Department of Health & Human Services, the agency responsible for Nely’s detention at a children’s facility in Florida. The whole situation was further complicated by the fact that Alexis had to advocate for her client over the phone. “But I was like a dog with a bone, a tenacious mother who was not going to stop until I got somebody on the line to commit to a date and time when Jorge and Nely would be reunited,” she says. Alexis achieved her goal, arranging for the father and daughter to be reunified within the week at Annunciation House, an El Paso immigration services agency. Within hours of their arrival in El Paso, Alexis, Lauren, and Claudia also arranged for another Guatemalan detainee, Jose, who was being held at a detention center in West Texas, to speak with his son Mateo, who was in a center for detained immigrant children in Florida. The two had not spoken in months. New York associate Andrew Kissner, who initially supported the effort to help Jose from afar, traveled to El Paso in September for a follow-up visit. Andrew continues to advocate for Jose’s release from detention and for his reunification with his son. Just before Andrew’s trip, New York associate Julian Radzinschi also traveled to El Paso to meet with a new client who had been detained in Texas since June while that client’s five-year-old daughter was being held in a New York shelter. “My client was supposed to be reunified in mid-July,” Julian explains. “But the government is quite WHO DOES IT