Later, when she was back home in Madison, Kris Rasmussen would remember the smell of oil. It was everywhere, and nobody in Artesia, New Mexico, was complaining. There was even a bronze sculpture of an oil rig.
It was incongruous, but Rasmussen would also remember the soundtrack from the movie “Frozen.” The film played endlessly, in Spanish. Children watched on a television, while in the next cubicle of a trailer that served as a makeshift law office, their mothers told their stories and tried not to weep.
That was life last October at the Department of Homeland Security’s Artesia Family Residential Center, a Border Patrol training academy transformed into a detention facility for women with children caught illegally crossing into the United States.
In October, when Rasmussen — a former University of Wisconsin in-house attorney who now specializes in pro bono immigration law — arrived in Artesia, there were more than 600 women and children being detained, most from Central America, where they had feared for their lives. A recent New York Times Magazine story on the U.S. detention camps called the gang violence now overwhelming Central America one of “the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time.”
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Immigration law is highly complex, but since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, women refugees with children had largely remained free of detention while awaiting a formal asylum hearing. Last summer — with the influx of refugee families from Central America — that changed.
The detention camp at Artesia was established. Because of the language barrier and the lack of access to legal assistance for refugees, some saw the camp as little more than a deportation mill.
“During the first five weeks that the Artesia facility was open,” the Times story noted, “officials deported more than 200 refugees to Central America.”
In August, Rasmussen received an email from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) that laid out what the group called serious due process violations at the facility, and asked attorneys to consider volunteering for a week in Artesia.
Rasmussen drove down, alone, in early October. Well, she wasn’t completely alone. She brought along a large box filled with 800 cards and letters of encouragement for the refugees, written by Wisconsin residents, young and old, who had learned of Rasmussen’s mission.
The detention facility was on the north end of the city, row upon row of metal, windowless buildings. There were signs forbidding photographs. Rasmussen got a hotel room in Artesia, but would spend little time in it. Her days at the detention facility lasted 16 hours. That first week she handled bond hearings, done by video conference, with a government attorney and judge in Denver.
There were successes. “I am so proud that this team has succeeded in significantly lowering the bonds women must pay to ensure that they will appear at an asylum hearing, once released,” Rasmussen noted, five days into her stay.
The very next day, a case wrenched her heart. A Central American woman had failed in her first interview to establish what is called “credible fear” for seeking asylum. “She can appeal,” Rasmussen noted, but success was now less likely, and the woman had already decided to let her 3-year-old daughter live with the woman’s brother in the United States.
“The child is at liberty to leave,” Rasmussen noted. “Now the mother has to decide whether to let her baby girl have a better life outside of detention, with the distinct possibility that she, the mother, may be deported. Then, would she take her daughter from this new life, back to the life they were fleeing?”
Rasmussen had sent a note to attorney friends in Madison, urging them to consider volunteering in Artesia. Three weeks in — on her last night — Rasmussen was at the small AILA headquarters and noticed a woman smiling at her. Rasmussen, exhausted, didn’t recognize her. “I’m Ramona!”
Ramona Natera is managing attorney of the Catholic Multicultural Center Immigration Program in Madison. She’d received permission to spend a week of vacation time at Artesia. (Another Madison attorney, Mary Castro, couldn’t get away, but paid Natera’s airfare.)
“It was surreal,” Natera said recently. “I had never done a bond hearing.” The first day, she did eight.
Thanksgiving week, three more Madison immigration attorneys — Robin Dalton, Kimberly Koopman and Amber Raffeet — traveled to Artesia, with legal assistant Elisa Obregon. They were surprised to find only one other volunteer attorney in Artesia. The second day, they handled 70 cases between them. For the week, they averaged about three hours of sleep a night. Artesia was closing, and the detainees were going to be sent to facilities in Texas.
That month — November — Kris Rasmussen spoke at the UW Law School about her experience. A student, Laura Graham, was moved enough that upon graduating in December, she flew to Texas and spent two weeks volunteering at two detention camps near San Antonio.
Graham had a chance to speak with some women who had earlier been in New Mexico. It was not encouraging. The conditions in the Texas camps, they said, made them wish they were back in Artesia.
Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. His column appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.