Immigration Family Detention: My Week at Karnes Residential Center

Before we begin

I spent July 1–7, 2018 in Texas, volunteering at Karnes Residential Center, a family immigration detention center. I’m an attorney and have been practicing immigration law since 2010. I volunteered at RAICES through Lawyers for Good Government. The two attorneys and one interpreter (my mom!) in our group were the first cohort sent to Karnes from L4GG.

A little about RAICES. They have been around for a while, helping families and working to end family detention. I’ll write more about them later but it’s important to know this: what they do under incredibly difficult circumstances, is amazing. They are a scrappy organization filled with passionate, caring staff. They have recently come into a lot of money thanks to crowdfunding, but they were all very careful to point out they plan to use that for long-term needs. It was an honor to work with them and I look forward to continuing to help from afar.

While much has been heard recently about separated children, which is an unimaginable horror, Karnes houses mothers and their children. During our time at the center, there were about 630 detainees, with more people arriving literally every day. On the legal side of things, it’s tough and getting tougher. RAICES staff attorneys noted that they’d seen more credible fear interview denials in the last couple of weeks than they had in the last few months. Judges are consistently affirming the negative credible fear decisions. Families seem to be detained for longer and longer periods of time, and are regularly sitting at the particularly difficult initial processing centers (known as hieleras) under consistently bad conditions for more than the prescribed 3 day maximum.

I want readers to understand the conditions on the ground at these centers, get a basic grasp of the legal hurdles, and recognize the humanity underlying all of this. I will start with the daily log I kept during my week at Karnes and will continue adding more information to help you better understand the system and the people caught up in it. Because we have to understand what we, as a nation, are doing to innocent mothers and children fleeing their beloved countries and seeking asylum. This will be a painful part of our country’s history, but we must do the work to understand it today.