Equal Justice Works Recognizes Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch

Equal Justice Works interviews Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch about leadership in public interest law. Kate has represented detained at Central Texas detention centers, including Hutto, and was one of the first of Barbara Hines' law students to visit Hutto. Great work!

UT Immigration Clinic Still At It!

Hutto no longer holds families, we're still happy to say, but now there are around 500 women held there. As the Daily Texan reports,

While struggling to attain asylum, hundreds of immigrant women are kept behind chain-link fences within a former medium security prison, no more than an hour away from the state Capitol.

A review of detention centers released on Oct. 6 by Dora Schriro, the former director of the U.S. Office of Detention Policy and Planning, made recommendations for detention centers. Janet Napolitano, U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, announced reforms for facilities soon after.

According to one reform, the center, which released the last family on Sept. 17, would detain women only. It has worked toward consolidating the female populations from three other facilities: Willacy, Pearsall and Port Isabel.

“Many of the settlement’s improvements that we achieved we hope will be continued to be maintained for the women, but the government is not bound by any settlement agreement,” Hines said.
UT law student Ruth Rosenthal works at the clinic and has visited the center with former UT law student — and current attorney for American Gateways — Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who also worked at the clinic.

Rosenthal provided counsel for 25 women and assisted a woman from El Salvador, resulting in the reduction of her bond at the center and subsequent release in October. “She had a really good asylum claim. Also, at Hutto she developed numerous medical conditions,” Rosenthal said. “There were a lot of humanitarian concerns that compelled her release at Hutto.”

Pruneda said facilities have arrangements with nearby medical centers to provide health care if specific services needed are not available at the facility. The facility maintains a population of 512 and remains substantially full,Lincoln-Goldfinch said. She said the facility has remained true to the settlement, giving it “a residential feel, rather than a correctional feel,” but policies dictating the retention of detainees may require reformation.

“[Detainees] should be paroled out as soon as they pass a credible fear interview,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said. “You have to show you have been persecuted in the past or [have] a well-founded fear of future persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.”

Pruneda said the average stay for detainees nationwide is 31 days. However, Lincoln-Goldfinch said some women may end up staying six to nine months “because their cases are a bit different.”

Lincoln-Goldfinch said alternatives, such as probation or an ankle-bracelet program, are a more cost-effective means of monitoring illegal immigrants.

“I would hope at some point there would be no Hutto facility in the sense that people would be released into the community more regularly and the government would explore alternatives to detention,” Hines said. “There are other means to ensure immigrants appear at their hearings, which is the rationale the government makes for detaining them in the first place.”

Free Least of These Screening, Austin, Tx

ACLU: Hutto Settlement Extended

ACLU Strikes Deal To Continue Humane Conditions At Hutto Detention Center
(8/7/2009; Updated 8/10/2009)

Agreement Will Remain In Place Until All Families Have Been Released

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials today struck a deal to extend an agreement requiring ICE to maintain improvements in the conditions at the T. Don Hutto family detention center in Texas and submit to external oversight until the last family is released from the facility.

The deal comes on the heels of an announcement Thursday that the government will immediately begin ending the detention of families at Hutto, the focus of 2007 lawsuits filed by the ACLU charging that children were being illegally imprisoned under inhumane conditions. The last family is expected to be released from Hutto no later than the end of the year.

"No young child should ever have to endure imprisonment in an adult prison," said Vanita Gupta, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program and a lead attorney in the Hutto litigation. "Now that the long-overdue decision has been made to end the detention of families at Hutto, the government is to be commended for wanting to ensure that the improvements in the facility's conditions that have been made during the past two years remain in place until there are no families left there."

The ACLU's lawsuits were filed on behalf of 26 immigrant children between the ages of one and 17 detained with their parents who, in almost all cases, were seeking asylum. A settlement agreement reached several months after the lawsuits were filed mandates, among a number of other things, that children be given expanded educational programming and increased recreation time outdoors. The agreement was set to expire August 29.

The decision to end family detention at Hutto was made as part of a broad government plan to improve the immigration detention system. According to the plan, officials will work to consolidate many detainees in facilities with conditions that reflect their status as non-criminals, establish more centralized authority over the system and create more direct oversight of detention centers.

The plan also calls for ICE to stop sending families to Hutto, and to relocate the remaining 127 detainees there. Some will be transferred to an 84-bed facility in Pennsylvania, while others will be considered for programs that do not require detention, such as home and electronic monitoring.

Attorneys involved in the Hutto litigation include Gupta of the ACLU's Racial Justice Program; Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project; Lisa Graybill of the ACLU Foundation of Texas; and Barbara Hines of the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic.

A copy of the stipulation is available online.

Additional information about the ACLU's Hutto litigation is available online at.