Immigration: Quicker release for detained migrants but also greater risk

Any day now, the young Guatemalan immigrant and his 4-year-old will learn their fate: release into the U.S. as an asylum seeker, or deportation.

Rene Ciprian Ordonez, 23, was interviewed last week at the family detention center here where he was transferred after he and his son crossed the border illegally into Texas on Sept. 29.

He said that a friend interviewed the same day had already been released. So had Ciprian Ordonez’s cousin, interviewed a few days later. The farmworker had seen plenty of other immigrants released recently, many with ankle monitors. But he had also seen others deported, including a friend he said was sent home in the middle of the night.

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The speed with which other immigrants learned their fate reflects recent changes in the nation’s three detention centers for immigrants, even if Ciprian is still waiting.

“They told me I would hear back in a week, but I haven’t heard,” Ciprian said Wednesday. “What’s the difference between me and them?”

This summer, it looked like the immigrant family detention centers, including this one and two in Texas, would be shuttered after a federal judge in Los Angeles found that they failed to meet conditions for detaining children set out in a 1997 settlement. The judge ordered the federal government to improve conditions at the facilities by Oct. 23.

One response by immigration officials has been to essentially convert the facilities into processing centers, holding more immigrants for shorter periods of time, releasing those who pass asylum interviews more rapidly and deporting others.

Instead of detaining families for months, the Berks County Residential Center here is holding them for a couple of weeks on average, officials said. For detainees, speedier processing can be a blessing or a curse, advocates said.

Attorneys representing the immigrants said they were re glad to see them being released, but complained that the quick turnover leaves little time for them to find attorneys, fight deportation or special conditions of release such as ankle monitors.

Berks, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is the oldest and smallest of the family detention centers, with 96 beds. Berks is also the only family detention center that houses men.

The other two family centers in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, house mothers and children, mostly Central Americans, in sprawling rural compounds that are expanding to house about 3,600 by year’s end.

Critics call them prisons, but officials strongly disagree, noting the various amenities and that those detained, or “residents,” can wear shoelaces and some of their own clothes.

Berks was 75% full this week, with 72 immigrants -- 29 men, seven women, and 36 children. They comprised 34 families, including two couples held with their children. The immigrants came primarily from Central America — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Romania, officials said.

The detention center is in a former nursing home, a boxy red brick building that sits surrounded by elm and pine woods between the county prison and fairgrounds, an area so rural that it’s not uncommon to see an Amish buggy on the road. Unlike the Texas facilities, this one has largely been out of the spotlight, in part because of its size and distance from the border.

Immigrants are free to walk outside to play on the basketball court and soccer field, ride bicycles and hike, all accompanied by uniformed staff members called counselors, not guards. They take regular field trips to the mall, bowling alley, ballpark, nearby Blue Marsh Lake and Hershey Chocolate World, officials said.

They sleep on spare bunks lined up on yellow linoleum, each assigned some shelves and storage bin for their few possessions. On Wednesday, someone left “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul” on one bed and a CD by the Weeknd, “Beauty Behind the Madness.” On another bed was a Bible, and a resident had tucked a rosary into her storage bin.

On Wednesday, a group of men gathered in a hallway to play pool and watch soccer on television. Down the hall, past children’s crayon drawings of skulls on display for the upcoming Day of the Dead or Dia de los Muertos, several women hopped along with an aerobics instructor on television in an activity room. (There’s also Zumba classes taught in person.)

Immigrants receive free legal orientation sessions with staffers from the York-based nonprofit Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, at least once a week. But the nonprofit does not represent the immigrants in court. Unlike the other family detention centers, there is no pro bono legal project bringing lawyers here, and federal immigration courts do not provide public defenders.

Ciprian’s attorney, Carol Anne Donohoe, complained that those detained here have not been able to meet with attorneys before their asylum interviews, and that when clients were released recently, she wasn’t notified until after they appeared with ankle bracelets, “so I can’t go argue why they shouldn’t have an ankle bracelet. If they’re signing something that says they’ll have an ankle bracelet, we should be there.”

“With all the people there and the quick turnover, there’s no way we local attorneys can represent all of them,” said Donohoe, among a few Philadelphia-based attorneys representing immigrants here. “If lawyers were in there right now, we would not be seeing this turnover.”

She pointed to another of her clients, Roberto Francisco-Mateo, a Guatemalan immigrant who has been fighting deportation since he arrived with his 8-year-old daughter in July. He failed his asylum interview, lost his appeal but is still fighting in court.

Francisco-Mateo, 28, worries so much about being deported that he sometimes can’t eat. He owes $5,000 in smuggler’s fees to a man in his old neighborhood, he explained as tears rolled down his cheeks. If he returns to Guatemala, the man has threatened to kill him and kidnap his daughter.

On Wednesday, Francisco-Mateo saw four new arrivals released with ankle monitors.

“I get frustrated watching people leave who have only been here for 10 days, and I’m here for months. But they have positive findings” for asylum, said Francisco-Mateo, also a farmworker who crossed the border illegally with his 8-year-old. “My daughter says, ‘Why Papa? Why do they get to go?’ I tell her, ‘Be patient. We’ll leave one day.’“

Twitter: @mollyhf