Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Estrella is this little girl.
She's four years old.
When she walks into the room with her mother,
she's wearing this big puffy jacket because the room is very, very cold.
And her jacket is covered with all of these stars,
and there's this big blue star that spans her zipper,
and it glitters and it sparkles.
And so I say to Estrella, I say, "Estrella, is that your favorite star?"
And she looks at me
as if I am just another one of those clueless adults
that inhabits a child's life,
and she shakes her head no,
and instead,
she points right here, to the smallest star on her jacket
that's this bright fiery red.
So I ask her. I say, "Estrella, why is that your favorite star?"
She looks down at her shoes, and she looks back up at me,
and she says, "Because it's the one nearest my heart."
And when she says this to me, little Estrella is in jail.
She's in jail with her mother
because in their native country of Guatemala,
they had been threatened with death,
and the Guatemalan government refused to protect them.
So in order to save their lives,
they fled to the United States to seek protection.
When they arrived at the border and applied for asylum,
the federal immigration system put them in jail
and scheduled them for immediate deportation.
Now honoring and safeguarding the rights of refuge
is an intractably difficult thing to do,
not just for the United States, but nations all around the world
find it increasingly challenging to protect the principle of refuge,
particularly in moments of crisis.
Estrella and her mother are refugees in the true sense of the word,
yet our immigration system's response was to jail and deport,
which is the exact opposite of providing refuge.
And our national history is filled with these instances,
where we have deported refugees back to very dangerous places,
and then after the fact, we've come to regret it.
And Estrella and her mother
are merely the latest examples of this recurring pattern.
And that's the question: Why?
Why does this keep happening?
Why is it so?
And what can we as a national community do
to disrupt those forces that make it so very difficult in a moment of crisis
to protect the principle of refuge?
Almost exactly two years ago today,
I was standing on the rooftop of a very swank law office
in a very posh part of Washington DC
with this dramatic view of the White House,
with other lawyers and advocates
sharing hors d'oeuvres being passed around by these fancy-dressed waiters
and having an absolutely marvelous time,
when one of the immigrant-rights lawyers from Colorado asked me and said,
"Hey, have you heard about the secret detention center
in the middle of the New Mexican desert,
where refugee children from Central America,
literally infants, two, four, six years old,
are in jail with their mothers and scheduled for immediate deportation?"
Now we knew that the Northern Triangle of Central America
was on the verge of collapse;
that vast parts of the geographic territory
of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
were beyond the control of the legitimate governments of those countries,
and were, in fact, being governed by these higher-order gangs,
not street gangs or turf gangs like we know of them here
but these sophisticated political entities that ruled physical space with violence
in a post-ideological conflict that was taking place -
adults were murdering children,
children being forced to murder other children.
And some of the most dangerous places to be
for a woman or a child in 2014, 2015, or 2016
was in the Northern Triangle of Central America,
and there was no one working in this field who did not know this,
which is why it made absolutely no sense
that the United States would be jailing children and women and entire families,
and scheduling them for their immediate deportation
without providing any meaningful access to the asylum system.
That would be against the law, and the United States wouldn't do that -
this is what I thought.
But the reports from the people who had been there were just so credible
that a team of advocates here from Oregon
followed the trail back to the detention center in Artesia, New Mexico,
to see for ourselves,
and what we found was that it was all absolutely true.
There are hundreds and hundreds of children and their mothers
hidden in this desert jail,
and the official policy was to get them all gone,
get all the women and all the children gone,
regardless of their claims for refuge
and before any of them had a meaningful opportunity to apply for asylum.
The official policy was to get them all gone in just a matter of weeks,
and these massive incidents of deportation,
they were to occur at a high velocity.
Now I've studied the concept of refuge.
I'm a lawyer by trade; I'm a lawyer at heart.
I've spent my entire legal career
believing in and defending rule of law principles:
that there is a law, that we can know what the law is,
and that we can enforce the law and enforce rights;
that is, if we can make the government do something,
we can make the government stop doing something,
through an orderly legal process.
Now that might sound naïve, but I do believe in it,
and in that belief,
I believe that rule of law principles become reality.
But creating systems that protect the rights of refugees defies that belief.
It is and has been so very difficult
to protect the rights of persons who are fleeing persecution.
The international system for the protection of refugees came about
because of World War II and the great failure of nations
to provide shelter to vulnerable populations fleeing peril.
After the war, the United States, along with 141 other countries,
entered into an international agreement
called the Convention Related to the Status of Refugees.
The convention and its protocol
were meant to provide a forward-looking mechanism
to protect humans from persecution
and to prevent what happened during the war from happening again.
Now, refugees and asylees are functionally identical,
and the difference is geography.
Our refugee seeker is outside the United States seeking protection
whereas an asylum seeker is inside the United States seeking protection;
that is, you have to be physically present in the United States
in order to file for asylum.
Now, that said,
no one in Central America can file for refugee status
because it's not possible;
there is no refugee screening mechanism there.
And so in order to seek protection
because they could not file for refugee status there,
the only way that Estrella and her mother could do this
was to physically come to the United States and file for asylum,
and so that's what they did.
To get asylum is really tough.
The evidentiary burdens are high,
and the process generally takes place
in this complex adversarial court system before a prosecutor and a judge,
and most people fail.
And that's with a good lawyer, before a good judge,
and lots of resources for evidence and witness preparation.
In the summer of 2014, when Estrella and her mother sought asylum,
exactly like today,
the politics and optics of the immigration debate
were ascended over the law of international protection,
and everything that is normally hard about proving an asylum claim
had suddenly become nearly impossible.
There is no guarantee of a lawyer in the asylum process,
so by design,
Estrella and her mother were on their own
to navigate this brutally complex system and to defend themselves by themselves
before a prosecutor and a judge.
Detention is authorized in the asylum process,
and here detention was being used
against infants and toddlers and entire families.
Estrella and her mother
were detained in a remote location under hostile conditions
with hundreds and hundreds of other women and children.
And to aggravate the matter,
US law essentially creates a force field around the detention center
that prohibits anyone from challenging in court
an illegal denial of asylum or an erroneous order to deport a refugee.
So it seemed like a fait accompli
that when we arrived in the detention center,
that every woman and every child
was going to be deported
back to some of the most dangerous places on earth,
and there was nothing we could do about it
because the asymmetry in power
and the numerical gap between the advocates and the refugees
was just too immense to bridge.
And that if we were going to save just a life,
just one life, like Estrella's life,
we would have to do something radically different;
we would have to do something that hadn't been done before,
and that is when we turn to people like you,
the crowd,
and the power of human compassion.
Alone,
the lawyers in the system could not make the protection system work right,
but the compassionate, connected crowd could.
Now crowdsourced refugee-rights defense strategy
allowed the lawyers on the ground
to immediately address the power asymmetry,
the proportionality problem,
and the fact that we had no time till the next wave of deportations.
So first, we harnessed the power of the crowd
to nationalize response beyond the handful of advocates in the center,
beyond the isolation of the New Mexican desert.
Now cellphones were prohibited, but computers weren't,
so we created a technological platform
to weave together hundreds and hundreds of volunteer lawyers and advocates
and teachers and preachers and students and mothers -
there were a lot of mothers -
to involve them in the hard work of defending refugee rights.
Second, we established a ground game
to tie together the on-the-ground volunteers with the crowd
so they could act in unison, like a hive.
We knew we couldn't ask a volunteer
to give up her life and drop everything to do this work.
That's one of the problems of refugee defense;
it takes place in these faraway locations under really difficult circumstances,
putting it out of reach for most.
So instead, we created a system
where we would ask a volunteer to give up just one week of her life,
and each week, a new team of volunteer advocates
would arrive on the ground, switch out with the old team,
and join the hive.
And then, using the vast power of the crowd,
we could leverage, we could leverage the crowd.
With just a handful of advocates in the center,
and we could represent every woman and every child detained in secret.
Third,
we turned to the crowd to rebalance the asymmetry in power.
Here's the dilemma.
In the asylum process,
the deportation officer has all of the power,
and Estrella, the little girl whose life is in danger has none.
And as a lawyer, I only have as much power as my client -
I'm merely a funnel for her power.
And as Estrella's lawyer, I could not protect her,
because the system had taken away all of my lawyer tools:
the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution -
that's the amendment that protects life and liberty
through the due process of law.
It was not powerful enough on its own to save Estrella's life,
so we turned to the crowd to build power outside the Fifth Amendment,
to slow the deportations down,
to create time and space to let the Fifth Amendment breathe again.
And finally, the nationwide network of advocates collected insane -
and I mean insane - amounts of data in real time about what was happening:
qualitative and quantitative pieces of information,
dozens and dozens of data points about each interaction and event.
And with this data,
the crowd could dynamically adapt and predict what we needed to do next
rather than waiting to react defensively.
And with this data,
we could advocate and litigate to shape the system
in the way it was supposed to be.
To get all of the women and all the children gone
in just a matter of weeks
required that the waves of deportation be massive and fast,
and indeed, they were.
In just a dozen days after the detentions center opened,
the waves began.
And to be in that space, that physical place,
when all of these living souls would just vanish overnight
was like nothing I had ever experienced before or since.
Everyone was going to be deported.
All of these little children were going to be deported
back to some of the most dangerous places on earth,
and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
And so, I want to show you this.
Those white dots,
those are children and women who are deported from the center.
You are seeing the opening days of the detention center
in the beginning of the massive waves.
The red dots are lawyers, and they're acting all alone.
They're by themselves.
And everyone is going to be deported, and we see that, and we cannot stop it.
And so we turn to the crowd. And check it out.
The next wave of removals is smaller and farther apart,
and then dynamic adaptation begins.
And check it out.
Deportations fall 97% until they vanish -
(Cheers) (Applause)
space and time for the Fifth Amendment to breathe again.
And what did we do with the Fifth Amendment?
For all the women and children
who were not deported and who remain detained,
we won a lot of cases.
So we call that everyone was supposed to be deported,
regardless of their claim of refuge
and before anyone had any meaningful access to the asylum system.
Alone, the lawyers achieved a 33% passage rate
for the initial threshold asylum screening.
In a crowdsourced refugee-defense strategy,
we now approach 100% passage rate of the threshold screening.
(Cheers) (Applause)
We call that most people fail in their asylum claims
and this system had been designed so that everyone would fail.
In a crowdsourced refugee-defense strategy,
we have won 98% of every claim that we've tried on the merits
in an adversarial system before a judge.
A crowdsourced system
that collectivized, nationalized, and dynamically adopted to data
had delivered these unheard of, amazing client outcomes.
The crowd had forced the system to work right,
and by working right, the system had proved its own worth.
These women and children were bona fide refugees.
And the narrative need for rapid removals was disrupted,
and the policy justifications
for the mass incarceration of asylum-seeking children and women
was qualitatively and quantitatively proven to be bankrupt,
and the secret detention center in Artesia New Mexico shut down.
(Cheers) (Applause)
I wish I could say that was the end of the story
because that would make for a great TED Talk.
(Laughter)
But the deportation system is dynamic too, and it adapted to our success.
And it has recently built the nation's largest -
if not the world's largest - immigrant jail in Texas,
operated by a private prison for profit,
designed yet once again, for the mass incarceration of families.
Now the legal system can be very slow to adapt and change,
but here we had no choice.
To solve the intractable problem of defending refugee rights,
we harness the power of the crowd
to create proportionality in symmetry and power
through innovative technology and human compassion,
to create a system where every meritorious claim
could win every time,
but that is only if we remain vigilant because the work is ongoing.
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)