ILD at the US-Mexico Border

While ILD’s offices are located in Oakland, California, the scope of our work is national – sometimes even international. Much of what we do can be tied back to the horrors of the U.S.-Mexico border and the US immigration system’s architecture of exclusion. 

Many of  ILD’s clients have endured the abuses and indignities of the border regime – whether at the border itself, at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, in immigration jails, or immigration courtrooms. ILD works to provide direct representation to those entangled within the border’s long reach while also working to dismantle the immigration enforcement system itself – a system that is rotten at its core and that seems to be growing all the more brutal with each passing day. This work frequently takes us to the border itself. 

ILD’s Managing Attorney, Ilyce Shugall, recently took part in a pro-bono delegation with the American Bar Association (ABA) to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where she began her career as an immigration attorney nearly twenty-five years ago.  

“The humanitarian crisis at the border is unlike anything I saw between 1999 and 2001,” Ilyce wrote in a blog post for the ABA. 

Such visits remind us that the violence along the border takes many forms. In March, ILD’s Managing Attorney, Claudia Valenzuela, and ILD Board Secretary, Sarah Diaz, brought a group of law students from Loyola University Chicago to southeast Texas as part of their immigration legal training. 

“The immigration system is stitched into the fabric of the border communities,” explains Diaz, Associate Director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children and Lecturer in the School of Law at Loyola.  But over the past two decades, she reflects, the border has become increasingly militarized. The overall tenor all along the border, now – as well as within the elements of the immigration system that stretch into the interior, such as detention and immigration courts – "can best be described as legalized violence." 

Border violence is also evident in the courtroom. Diaz and Valenzuela’s students sat in on proceedings at the Harlingen, Texas courthouse. This visit “really cemented for students the notion that the immigration courtroom is not a fair and neutral place for immigrants,” Valenzuela explains. From the way the judge addressed scared immigrants in court to the manner in which the guards interacted with the student delegation upon entry, the environment was an adversarial one – hostile even. 

“I have worked in legal academia since 2007,” Diaz wrote in a recent letter, “and I have found that less and less of my students are interested in pursuing a career in immigration because they perceive the system to be biased and painfully broken.”

When Shugall visited the encampments in Matamoros, she was horrified at what she saw – people living in tents made of garbage bags, few accessible bathrooms, no services because the Mexican government had recently barred nonprofits from working in the camp – and all because the US was forcing these individuals seeking protection to wait on the Mexican side of the border for their turn to request protection at a port of entry. 

Another mechanism of border violence is deportation. ILD’s Founding Managing Attorney, Laura Polstein, recently made a trip to an Arizona detention facility because that’s where her client – a man we’ll call Felipe who had been deported years ago for reasons that are no longer grounds for deportation – was ordered to appear for his merits hearing. She was fighting to have Felipe’s permanent residence restored. Since being deported, he’d primarily lived alone, struggled to afford critical prescription medication, and was separated from his family. He missed his son’s funeral because he wasn’t allowed back across “the line,” i.e., the border. To even attend his hearing, Felipe had to travel many miles with limited resources, meet his sister at the border checkpoint, and then drive many more hours to endure an adversarial court hearing from within an immigration jail – itself a symbol of the repressive nature of the border and its attempts to both warehouse people and break them down. Felipe won his case, which was a life-changing victory, but only because of Polstein’s tenacity and ability to navigate the system’s ruthless labyrinth.

It’s important to note that the violence of US immigration policies has a body count. Since 2014, 4,544 people have died attempting to cross into the US, according to the Missing Migrants Project. And those are just the ones we know about.  

“Customs and Border Protection knows people are dying on their territory, and they don’t do anything about it,” Diaz says. Instead, the agency is actively pushing people into this hostile territory. "Advocates have begun to describe this phenomenon as the forced disappearance of migrants through death in the desert, but it's carried out under the guise of lawful border enforcement policy." Meanwhile, dozens of people have died in ICE custody–many, as recent reports have found, as a result of inadequate or negligent medical care. 

At ILD, we understand that much of the immigration system’s inner workings connect back to the border’s brutal machinery–and we wish that more US-Americans saw first-hand the way our policies and tax dollars are made manifest there.  

“Any visit to the border triggers a lot of emotions for folks,” Valenzuela says–whether they are people crossing the border or working on their behalf. 

When Shugall visited the asylum seeker encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, she was constantly approached by groups of asylum seekers looking for help. Though they had limited food and water, no sanitation services or medical care, what they were looking for was information about how to use the wildly dysfunctional CBP One app to navigate their cases, how to find an attorney, when they might get a hearing, how to access critical medical care, and when and how to reunite with family members. In our current system, this sort of information can be a matter of life and death. 

The complexity of the immigration system can thus be seen as another form of violence at the border, borne of ill-sighted and cruel U.S. immigration laws and policies, as can the lack of universal representation in immigration courts. This is why ILD’s work is so critical – providing urgent direct assistance to people caught in our immigration system while working to dismantle the system itself.