n a t i o n a l
IMMIGRATION
p r o j e c t
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From the Prisons Almanac 2005 |
of the National Lawyers Guild
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n a t i o n a l IMMIGRATION p r o j e c t |
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Back | ||
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of the National Lawyers Guild |
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Keeping Hope Alive is a new outreach program that is being sponsored by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. The goals of the program are to:
The program is staffed by Malik Ndaula, who is a South African national and a former detainee. Ndaula fled to the U.S. at the age of twelve after the assassination of his parents, who were outspoken members of the anti-apartheid movement. After spending several years in the U.S. without securing political asylum he was eventually detained by the immigration system after serving time for a petty misdemeanor offense. He spent most of his teenage years detained in the Oakdale, Louisiana detention facility and secured his release in May 2004 by litigating his own case.
Through Keeping Hope Alive, Ndaula is supporting a range of activities that address the legal needs of detainees in the Southern United States, with a special focus on detainees in facilities under the jurisdiction of the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement District Office. These activities include:
Ndaula is also being mentored by the Executive Director of the National Immigration Project, Dan Kesselbrenner. Kesselbrenner is a national recognized expert on deportation defense issues and matters concerning the immigration consequences of criminal convictions. He is the co-author of Immigration Law and Crimes (Westlaw), which is one of the most widely read treatments of the subject, and has served as a consultant on numerous legal teams and coalitions that provide support to federal and public defenders helping noncitizen clients. Two of these projects include the Defending Immigrants Partnership (supported by the Open Society Institute) and the Board of Immigration Appeals Pro Bono Project.
Keeping Hope Alive borrows from the support model that the National Immigration Project has used, for the past twenty years, in its outreach work with immigration practitioners, immigrant communities and government workers. A central feature of this model is the Immigration Project’s teamwork approach to addressing immigrant legal needs. This involves person-to-person liaison work, and focused trainings that are designed to help traditional and nontraditional legal workers better understand each other’s roles in the legal process. The Immigration Project conducts similar trainings with government workers, which are informed by the concerns and knowledge base of immigrants and their legal counsel. These trainings primarily address misinformation about existing policy or cultural-experiential communication barriers that lead to unintended or unnecessary barriers in immigration casework. These trainings also lay the foundation for intervention strategies that allow government workers and immigration practitioners to trouble-shoot problems before they reach the point of litigation.
One example of this model is Associate Director, Gail Pendleton’s liaison work with the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of battered immigrants. Through this work, Pendleton develops internal policies and trouble-shooting strategies that are implemented in partnership with government workers. This model is also reflected in Dan Kesselbrenner’s earlier liaison work with former Immigration and Naturalization Service on behalf of Central American asylum seekers who were seeking a reconsideration of their applications under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act.
Keeping Hope Alive is using a similar approach to address detainee complaints of mistreatment at Etowah County jail (Gadsen, Alabama) which is one of the many criminal system facilities that is now accommodating detainees alongside its incarcerated jail population. The ACLU Immigrant Rights Project and the Stanford Law School Immigration Clinic sent representatives to join Ndaula in his visit with Etowah jailhouse officials which occurred in late October, 2004.
The issues raised during this visit were informed by complaints received through his support work with detainees and complaints documented in two recent, class action suits. These complaints were punctuated by the untimely death of a diabetic Cuban detainee a week before the visit, who was unable to get jailhouse workers to increase his daily dosage of insulin shots. In addition to this matter of medical negligence, detainees also expressed concern about the high cost of phone calls (which make the cost of maintaining contact with legal counsel prohibitive), no accommodation for the religious observance of detainees, and very restricted freedom of movement which did not seem warranted for people who were not violent offenders or high security-risks.
Ndaula, and the other members of the visiting team, were encouraged by the willingness of jailhouse officials to discuss the detainees concerns. Since the visit, the team has learned that security measures used for the general detainee population have been relaxed and that there have been efforts to improve the meals being provided to detainees.
Through these efforts, Keeping Hope Alive aims to create opportunities for detainees to voice concerns in a way that minimizes confrontation between detainees and prison administrators. The environment created by these dialogues also facilitates Ndaula’s individual case work with detainees, by reducing barriers that might discourage detainees from becoming more involved in processing their cases with the immigration system.
Ndaula plans to follow up these talks with individual support work with detainees and efforts to improve the law library at the county jail. In 2005, Ndaula will use this approach to initiate similar dialogues with detention center administrators in other states. Some issues he plans to address involve encouraging prison administrators to:
Through this outreach work, Ndaula hopes to sensitize prison officials to specific kinds of frustrations experienced by detainees. Because many detainees are held in facilities that also contain incarcerated persons, there is a tendency on the part of some guards and wardens, to see detainees as persons who are serving time for criminal offenses. In fact, many detainees have committed no crimes and those who have been convicted for, what are usually, minor offenses, have already served a sentence in the criminal justice system. Unlike incarcerated persons, however, detainees face the prospect of being held indefinitely (in some cases, years beyond the time served for their criminal offense) until their legal status is resolved by the immigration system.
This also means that self-advocacy is more critical for detainees who are seeking to be released than for incarcerated persons—most of whom have the option of waiting out their sentences. Whereas some incarcerated persons become involved in litigating their case, because they are seeking early release, detainees often have to become involved if they want to see any resolution to their case at all. As a result, poor access to legal support can have a much more debilitating effect on the stress level and morale of detainees, who are facing “sentences” that potentially, have no limits.
In 2005, Ndaula will be working with Immigration Project staff to communicate these messages about, the importance of case advocacy to detainees, to prison administrators and the general public.