(music)
- [Man] Homero has represented detained immigrants
in Louisiana for years.
- [Homero] We're violating people's rights by having them
detained like this, and treating them like animals.
What we're doing is traumatizing people,
putting them in detention, trying to force them to give up.
Instead of being the welcoming country
that we're supposed to be.
I don't think most people in Louisiana or even
necessarily nationally, know that the majority
of the people being detained are asylum seekers.
People that either turn themselves in at the border
or were caught soon after crossing, and have been sent
to Louisiana to await their asylum case.
Not people that have committed crime.
So, I leave my house in the mornings,
get on the road and typically just try to power
all the way through to the detention center,
depending on which one I'm going to.
If I get hungry or something, I'll stop and get some food
but generally I just power through,
to try to get to the detention center
as quickly as possible.
We typically go only to Pine Prairie,
and so that's about a three, three and a half hour drive.
Today we're making the trip up to Jackson
for some special cases.
That's a four and a half hour, five hours depending
on traffic, drive.
Jackson Parish is a new facility that opened up,
I think it was towards the end of last year,
possibly early this year, and it's holding primarily
or exclusively asylum seekers.
- [Man] Asylum seekers like Dixan who fled Cuba
and was locked up in an ICE detention facility
in Pine Prairie, Louisiana.
- I'm coming to see four people, one of them is a client
of ours that has his final hearing coming up in
early November, and so I'm just finally preparing him
for the last process.
And then, another one I'm signing on he's gonna be a client
and the other two I'm helping some colleagues
get some documents signed for them,
so that they can use for their hearings.
(music)
How you doing, sir?
- [man] I'm all right.
(indistinct talking in background)
- [Man] The number of immigrants being detained
in the United States has reached it's highest levels ever.
At just of fifty thousand, and while these detentions
didn't begin under President Trump his administration
has drastically expanded the program.
Over the last year in Louisiana alone
the number of detained immigrants has risen
from an estimated two thousand to over eight thousand.
Meaning the state accounts for about
one in six detainees nationwide.
But, why Louisiana?
- [Jamila] In the 1990s a lawsuit lead to a settlement
in which there had been a number of problems
with overcrowding in the state prisons.
And the solution to that was to open up
a number of local parish prisons across the state.
At first the idea of having a bunch of different
parish prisons across the state seemed like a positive one.
You were going to lower the number of folks
who were in the state facilities, address overcrowding.
Instead what you found was that more and more
areas of the state of Louisiana became financially
dependent upon the money they were getting
from the department of corrections to run
the local parish prisons.
- [Man] And that economic dependence, among other things
paved the way for Louisiana to become
the world's highest incarcerator per capita.
- The problem with incarceration in Louisiana
I'd best describe as a cancer.
That metastasized throughout every aspect of the system.
So we really had just a confluence of factors
that contributed to this incredibly high
incarceration rate, which was almost double
the national average.
- [Man] In 2017 the state passed a number of progressive
criminal justice reforms that were intended to reduce
the states prison population,
and for the most part they worked.
The states incarcerated population dropped
by an estimated 3000 people.
- Were you expecting a federal agency like ICE
to come into these local parish prisons
and fill up these jails?
- [Man] One person who is influential
in passing these reforms was Walt Leger,
the top ranking democrat in
Louisiana's house of representatives.
We sat down with the outgoing lawmaker to talk about
the unintended consequences of these reforms.
- We saw a decrease of an estimated 3000
in the incarceration rate, and that dropped Louisiana
to number two.
- [Walt] Right.
- But within the last six months ICE has come in
and filled up these jails with an estimated 8000.
Is it fair to say that Louisiana is not the prison
capital of the states, and the prison capital of the world
if you're incarcerating more bodies, they're just not
in the same system.
- [Walt] I don't know how the numbers compare
to the other states and how they stack up,
but certainly I guess it just depends on how you measure it.
You know, I mean..
(overlapping)
- Louisiana is the number one detainer of asylum seekers
next to Texas.
- And the state of Louisiana has virtually no authority
to prevent the federal government from inserting those
detainees into facilities in Louisiana.
- But there's a reason why they're specifically
drawn to Louisiana.
- I'm not sure why Louisiana is such an attractive place
to do business for the federal government
and for these detainees.
It certainly does not make me comfortable
that people who are legally seeking asylum
are being detained in prison facilities.
I think there's a better way to do that,
and I think congress needs to figure that out quickly,
because it just doesn't seem like the American way.
- [Man] But the state could ban private for-profit
prisons, like California has recently done.
- Do you think that that is something
that should be addressed in the state?
- [Walt] I think it has been addressed over the years.
I believe that there are less here now then there were
ten years ago, and I think there's probably gonna be
a move to continue to move in that direction.
But, I certainly don't think that that should
be a for-profit venture.
- This is a complete betrayal of our commitment
to decarceration in Louisiana.
I think it's infuriating to know that we worked
so hard to reduce the incarcerated population,
only to have folks who are innocent, who are seeking asylum,
people who are fleeing violence, all kinds of harms
in their home country, to be subject
to the kinds of conditions that we know
exist in some of these facilities.
It's very frustrating and I can say that we never
ever intended this to happen.
The other piece is that a lot of what's happening
in this state has to do with private prison companies
operating these facilities, and so, there has to be some
advocacy around bringing attention to the fact that
We have sheriffs who have essentially open vacant beds
that they realize now that the state
would pay them 24 dollars and 39 cents to keep a Louisiana
citizen in that bed, but ICE will pay them almost
70 dollars to have an immigrant person in that bed.
That is a perverse financial incentive that people
are terming as a blessing.
- [Man] This system has led to an influx of thousands
of ICE detainees into the state.
It has stretched lawyers like Homero,
who are unable to keep up with all the new cases,
to their limits.
And that almost surely means that the more immigrants
ICE moves into Louisiana, the more deportations will
happen as a result of it.
- [Homero] Now I'm heading to Pine Prairie
to go visit with clients and do a couple of intakes
with some potential new clients.
It's one of the older detention centers that was here
before the big expansion happened, and it's the detention
center where we dedicate the majority of our time
and the majority of our resources.
We believe that people in immigration proceedings
should have an attorney and at the moment they're not
entitled to an attorney, they have the right to an attorney
if they can afford one, or find one for free.
But they're not entitled to an attorney.
There are so many cases where you see people just get
steamrolled through the process
because they don't have an attorney.
96 percent of cases in Louisiana where someone
doesn't have an attorney ends up in a deportation.
- [Man] Homero helped Dixan win his asylum case
making him one of the lucky few to leave Pine Prairie
as a free man, and not in deportation.
After driving hours to meet his clients sometimes
things don't go as planned.
- [Homero] So my list for today was 22 people
and, I was able to see 15 of those 22.
When stuff like that happens it really feels (beep).
There's nothing I can really do about it
and it makes you feel really powerless and impotent.
I'm gonna miss time with my daughter
as I'm trying to get back as quickly as possible
to see her before she goes down for the night.
- [Man] And for the thousands of other immigrants
tucked away in rural Louisiana who will never have
access to a lawyer like Homero, their chances of remaining
in the U.S. are slim to none.
- Who I'm angry at right now is the overall system.
I mean, yes the president in particular is making
this happen but it's a systemic problem that we have
at a bureaucratic level that the immigration system
is designed to work this way and to frustrate efforts
to help immigrants.
The deck is stacked against 'em, and so,
it's the entire system is designed in a way
to make it impossible for people to really fight their cases
and be able to win, and it's intended
to make people give up.
Not giving up and fighting back against that is
step number one, and so if I can sacrifice a little
bit of my privilege and go and do that,
then why not.
The alternative to there being no pro-bono representation
is a lot more people being deported without
any kind of due process.
(country music)