Yesterday, the nationwide radio program Democracy Now! ran a segment on hunger strikers at the Port Isabel Detention Center in the Río Grande Valley of South Texas. Given that our firm practices at PIDC, I can attest to the lack of legal assistance available to these detainees. The detention center is in the middle of nowhere. There are only a handful of lawyers who regularly accept clients from PIDC. Some of these attorneys are in private practice and others work at one of the few non-profits that help detained immigrants, but they all share a commitment to defending immigrants. Rama Carty, a detainee featured on Democracy Now!, sheds some light on what we frequently encounter in these hidden corners of the prison system:
“The vast majority of us do not understand immigration law or
constitutional law. We don’t understand how significantly our rights
are being violated. And so, people end up getting deported. And also
people end up giving up and signing out and letting themselves be
deported, because they cannot deal with being detained for three, four,
six, ten months, twelve months, and not—through a very slow process,
you know, which is designed just for that, to actually get people to
sign out. So people are signing out, and also they’re getting also
deported, because they’re mandatorily detained.”
The entire program is worth listening to.
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