Yale Law Students Organize To Aid Refugee Families

July 20, 2016 By
Photo Credit: Yale Law School Report, 6/29/16

Photo Credit: Yale Law School Report, 6/29/16

The story begins like this: “Cruz Montano and her daughter were two of the thousands of women and children who were taken to an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas after crossing the border into the U.S. seeking refuge. They were also among the earliest clients of a newly formed organization called the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), founded at Yale Law School.”
 
The Yale Law website backgrounds that “… Conchita Cruz ’16, Swapna Reddy ’16, Dorothy Tegeler ’16, and Liz Willis ’17 co-founded ASAP in the Spring of 2015 to respond to the unmet legal needs of Central American refugee families, both while detained in border detention facilities and after release. The project started as a volunteer effort funded by the Gruber Project for Global Justice and Women’s Rights at Yale when the co-founders traveled with fellow law students to the Texas detention center. There, they filled a gap in legal services by representing a Honduran mother at her trial, helping to secure her and her 8-year-old son’s legal status and release from the facility.”
 
Studies have indicated that refugees with legal help are many times more likely to gain residency status in the U.S.
 
Read about their effort here:
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NYT Offers Insight Into Obama’s Immigration Woes

February 1, 2016 By
Photo from NYT report, 1/8/16: A 2-year-old boy from Honduras at a shelter in San Antonio, where he stayed with his mother before joining relatives elsewhere in the United States.

Photo from NYT report, 1/8/16: A 2-year-old boy from Honduras at a shelter in San Antonio, where he stayed with his mother before joining relatives elsewhere in the United States.

A New York Times story is detailing how an influx of Central American refugees is complicating the Obama Administration’s immigration policies, including how building family detention camps to send an anti-immigration signal in 2014 has come back to challenge legal and political situations in an election year. In particular, the report notes that Jude Dolly M Gee of the Federal District Court of the Central District of California ordered back in August that migrant children could not be held in a locked detention center and had to be released, with their parents, “without unnecessary delay.”

Instead of moving away from the camps, the government doubled-down win increased capacity. The NYT report is also interesting in noting that the camps were meant to send a “stay away” message to potential asylum seekers. It says that the “… Obama administration devised a strategy to manage the influx, putting them in detention centers to convince others that illegal crossers would be caught and sent back.”

Read the report here: A Rush of Central Americans Complicates Obama’s Immigration Task

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