Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Our immigration court system is gummed up. There’s a backlog of more than 3.3 million immigration court cases, including a record number of people seeking asylum.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That means it could take years for a case to finally reach a judge. And even if that happens, most migrants won’t have a lawyer. And that makes it really hard to win a deportation case and stay in this country.
Ali Saidi: Having an immigration attorney versus not having an immigration attorney has profound, profound impacts on your ability to present fully your your claim. And most of these claims that we’re seeing are asylum seeking family units.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Concord is the site of a new immigration court that opened last month. To try and help ease this backlog, and advocates in Contra Costa County are now working overtime to find more lawyers to help handle these cases. Today, what people in Contra Costa County are doing to try and help defend people from deportation?
Tyche Hendricks: On Sunday, I went out to the Ignacio Valley High School in Concord.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Tyche Hendricks is senior immigration editor for KQED.
Tyche Hendricks: They called it an immigration forum. It was geared towards Spanish speaking immigrants. There were nearly 200 people who came out for it. There were folks who had questionnaires and they had different colored stickers. And depending on kind of questions, you you had what you were there looking for. They would give you, you know, red, yellow, green, orange sticker, blue sticker. And then they would put a number on it. Then he ends up in the middle.
Tyche Hendricks: You know, you have an asylum question. You get a blue sticker and a number one, next person number two, next person number three. And someone on stage was calling, okay, blue number 43, go to table six for a Long Island moment. And minority say in a table six there would be an immigration lawyer volunteering and you would get to have a one on one conversation with them about your question. It was very organized and it was it was kind of lively and there was a very a warm vibe there.
Emma Paulino: The idea is for people to get informed, not to feel like afraid, but just for people to know this is what is happening.
Tyche Hendricks: One person who was sitting at the desk with the yellow and green stickers was a woman named Emma Paulino.
Emma Paulino: Most of the people, I will say 80% of the people who came to this event came because they need the consultations with the attorneys.
Tyche Hendricks: And she is with this group, Faith in action. She’s based in Oakland. They’ve been doing these kinds of immigration forums and legal clinics, she said, for 23 years. And she was really the person who started it.
Emma Paulino: I’m really proud of it because through these 20 plus years, like you have and like how much it costs to one person, each consultation with them and an attorney s hundreds of thousands of dollars that the people save already by doing this services.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know Emma actually ran into someone that she had helped. Can you tell me about that moment as you were talking with her?
Tyche Hendricks: We were talking. And this woman walks up and says, oh, Emma Paulino oh, I want to thank you so much. And she launches into this story and then gives her a huge hug
Tyche Hendricks: The woman’s name is Rosaura Mayen.
Rosaura Mayen: [speaking spanish]
Tyche Hendricks: And she came from Guatemala seven years ago as an asylum seeker fleeing gang violence and threats. A gang was was making threats against her daughter and and Rosaura says she stood up to the gang.
Rosaura Mayen: [speaking spanish]
Tyche Hendricks: And then there were threats against herself and her family that they ended up coming to the States and seeking asylum. And she had found a lawyer that she couldn’t afford to pay.
Rosaura Mayen: [speaking spanish]
Tyche Hendricks: Emma Paulino, the woman from Faith in action, helped her find a nonprofit lawyer who would work for free. And last September, Rosaura got her asylum and her daughter did too.
Rosaura Mayen: [speaking spanish]
Tyche Hendricks: But then there she was on Sunday at at the high school event in Concord. Because her husband’s case is different, and she was there with her husband, looking for some legal guidance for him.
Rosaura Mayen: [speaking spanish]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Tyche. Why was this happening in Concord, of all places?
Tyche Hendricks: Well, because there’s a brand new immigration court in Concord. You know, the whole Bay area and really more than Northern California, but from like Bakersfield to the Oregon border, all those cases have been in the San Francisco immigration court orbit. But now there are cases from the San Francisco court where you thought you were going to court in San Francisco.
Tyche Hendricks: Your case has been transferred to Concord, and in some cases, you’re the date of your hearing has been changed. Some cases, it’s earlier than you expected. Big part of what they were doing was getting the word out to people like, you need to check, and here’s how to check whether you’re hearing time and place have been moved. So you don’t miss your hearing. Because if you miss your immigration court hearing, you can be ordered deported in absentia, meaning that you’re not you don’t show, okay?
Tyche Hendricks: Automatically. We’re just going to deport you. You know, you don’t have the right to a court appointed lawyer, so you have to find your own. And lots of people can’t afford to hire a private practice immigration lawyer. So a lot of it falls to a handful of nonprofit groups that do immigration, legal work, deportation, defense to a very small program that the county funds with a couple of lawyers in the public defender’s office and two, three, four lawyers in nonprofits who are getting some county funding.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, but I can imagine, I mean, even coming to a new country and having to navigate all that must be so overwhelming. What is the need that this new immigration court in Concord is trying to fill?
Tyche Hendricks: The San Francisco court has one of the largest caseloads in the country. They have had a backlog of 160,000 cases. It’s not often that you have a new a brand new immigration court that’s stood up. There is a small court in Sacramento that has about eight judges. There’s 27 judges in the San Francisco court. But, you know, the the waiting time for your case to be heard could be two, three, four years. Moving it out to Concord then allows people who are coming from further away, like all the way down the Central Valley, to travel.
Tyche Hendricks: Not quite as far is going all the way to San Francisco. And so this is just kind of expanding, the capacity in the Bay area to handle immigration cases. So the new court will have when it’s fully staffed, it’ll have 21 judges. It’s in least office space in, in an office building in Concord off of a busy boulevard. I think they have 11 judges now, and they’re, you know, they’re hoping to keep hiring up.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How big of a dent ticket is this supposed to make in this national immigration backlog that we’ve been talking about?
Tyche Hendricks: The San Francisco caseload is down from 160,000. It’s now 120,000. And those 40,000 plus cases are now on the docket for the Concord court. And the Biden administration has been trying to expand. They’ve hired about 300 new immigration judges and stood up six new courts around the country. But Republicans in Congress succeeded in cutting the immigration court budget. So that’s going to mean belt tightening at all the immigration courts. And it’s kind of the opposite of what they were hoping to do to try to clear this, this 3 million case backlog.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, we’ll hear from immigration lawyers who are doing what they can to help people with their cases. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What has the opening of the this immigration court meant for the county specifically? It sounds like a lot of I guess action is coming to the area.
Tyche Hendricks: Yeah. It’s true. I mean, the court has been in San Francisco. There’s a long standing effort by the immigration bar in San Francisco to provide more pro bono legal services to people going to court there. None of that has existed out here. So there’s been a big scurry by the nonprofit groups in the East Bay that serve immigrants to hustle and figure out how to help folks.
Ali Saidi: Welcome to my little corner. This is my office to the left.
Tyche Hendricks: So Ali said he works for the public defender’s office in Contra Costa. And I met him and his team at their office in Martinez.
Ali Saidi: Okay, team, everybody has a copy of the agenda. Yes. Okay. So, as you all know, the new court is opening up.
Tyche Hendricks: He runs this small unit of immigration lawyers doing deportation defense. And he’s also the director of a coalition called Stand Together Contra Costa that includes the public defender’s office and a bunch of nonprofits that are working in this area.
Ali Saidi: There’s over 13,000 Contra Costa residents that have pending deportation cases. And there’s over a thousand in the last 90 days that have been newly, placed into deportation proceedings. So, obviously six lawyers is not enough to handle all of that. That’s why we’re not doing this alone.
Tyche Hendricks: And they wanted to be sure that people know that this court is not an Ice detention center, like there’s, you know, you’re just going to court here. You’re not going to be locked up.
Ali Saidi: And we want to let the community know where they can go to get help, to understand if their cases are going to be transferred to this new deportation court. And to have access to free legal consultations and hopefully connect as many people as we can, given our limited resources with, actual attorneys to be able to present and process their cases.
Tyche Hendricks: He also really has a strong critique of the immigration court system, where, how can you represent yourself in an asylum claim or, you know, a deportation case if you don’t know immigration law, which is like second to the tax code and complexity is very complicated and that folks are being kind of rushed into, what he thinks of as like a pipeline of a rushed deportation process without access to attorneys. He sees as a serious due process problem.
Ali Saidi: The statistics bear out that the difference between having an immigration attorney versus not having an immigration attorney has profound, profound impacts on your ability to present fully your your claim. And most of these claims that we’re seeing are asylum seeking family units. We have epic backlogs, and there’s a lot of reasons to be able to process cases more quickly, but not at the expense of due process.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What can happen if people don’t get that legal representation?
Tyche Hendricks: If you have an asylum claim, you’re coming to the US and asking for asylum. Here is the equivalent of refugee protection that you fear persecution in your home country based on a series of possible grounds. But if you don’t have a lawyer to make that case for you, the statistics show that more than 80% of the time people lose their asylum cases. If you do have a lawyer, your chances are a lot better.
Tyche Hendricks: Almost half of people with lawyers when they’re asylum claims. Unfortunately, nationally, at this point, only a third of the people who are facing deportation in immigration court have a lawyer. So, you know, those legal services are really important and there’s really not enough of them. And that is, you know, true and conquered. It’s true in the immigration courts everywhere in the country.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, I want to end Tyche by asking you about how what happens locally in Concord kind of connects to what’s happening on the national level, because there is a presidential election coming this November, it’s going to be Donald Trump versus Joe Biden again. Immigration is a big issue. And I mean, I think we can all expect a lot of news, a lot of rhetoric around immigration again this year. How do you hope this story helps people understand the issue of immigration in this election, especially folks here in the Bay area?
Tyche Hendricks: Trump and the Republican Party have have really made. Immigration, the border, and specifically a sense of chaos at the border and a sense of sort of invasion by immigrants as kind of a, talking point in their campaigning. It’s absolutely the case that there are a great number of people coming to the border asking for asylum. And the Biden administration, I think, has been trying to manage migration and manage the border.
Tyche Hendricks: It really illustrates how it’s a big national issue, but it comes down to individual people’s lives and individual people’s stories and the odyssey that these individual folks are on to say, you know, I was fleeing death threats in Guatemala, and this is where I came to seek refuge. Here are some people from the faith community, from the legal services community, who are reaching out to try to help folks feel less intimidated and feel less alone.
Tyche Hendricks: There was a real sense of community fabric here in the Bay area, in Contra Costa, of responding to those individual needs of people on their on their journey and saying like, how can we help? How can we make you feel safer, make you feel like you belong, and and see if we can help give you a pathway to be part of the community here.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’ll take you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. I really appreciate it.
Tyche Hendricks: Well, it’s my pleasure. Great to talk to you always, Ericka.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Tyche Hendricks, senior immigration editor for KQED. This 39 minute conversation with Tyche was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. Maria Esquinca is our producer. She scored this episode and added all the tape music courtesy of the Audio Network.
