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Legal guide uses immigration work in Louisiana to educate advocates around the country [1]
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Date: 2025-04-02
For immigration attorney Mich Gonzalez, who has been practicing in Louisiana since 2019, meeting with clients in the state’s far-flung detention centers has always been challenging.
The rules at each one of the lockups — about what electronics are permitted or how much time he has with a client — can differ and security measures frequently change. And after making the hourslong drive from his office in New Orleans to one of the eight facilities around the state, he can be denied access to his clients for any number of reasons. Last month, he said, he drove three hours to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile only to find out he couldn’t meet with a client because of a viral outbreak.
Still, for all the roadblocks and delays, his clients are the lucky ones. They have an attorney. Under federal law, deportation is a civil, not a criminal, proceeding. So, unlike criminal defendants, people facing removal after being picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement do not have the constitutional right to an attorney.
“The sad reality is that most people don’t have a lawyer,” Gonzalez said. “Statistically it’s been shown that people’s chances improve when they have legal representation. The key is having someone who can help that person navigate the immigration system, who is not being impeded by a cage.”
For many immigrants stuck inside Louisiana’s detention centers, located in rural towns far away from major metropolitan areas, the only opportunity they have to interact with a lawyer might be during visits from organizations presenting information on legal processes and their rights – commonly called a “know your rights” presentation.
Since 2021, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Louisiana and RFK Human Rights, has regularly conducted these know your rights presentations inside Louisiana detention centers.
Now, as the number of people detained in ICE facilities across the country is growing and government funding for programs that provide legal guidance to immigrants is threatened under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, one national advocacy group is using experiences from coalition employees and volunteers working in Louisiana to train lawyers and advocates around the country.
Last week the Acacia Center for Justice – a Washington-based nonprofit that supports legal services for immigrants — along with RFK Human Rights and the ACLU of Louisiana — released a training guide to legal access in immigration detention, based on what practitioners have done in Louisiana.
The inspiration for the guide came in January, just days into Trump’s second term when the U.S. Department of Justice briefly cut funding to government programs that offer legal services to immigrants.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment on this story.
While the cuts were in effect, advocates experienced new barriers to accessing immigrants in detention, Kel White, an associate director of learning and development at the Acacia Center for Justice, said.
The federal government has long had contracts with advocacy groups to educate detainees on their rights — giving presentations inside or distributing materials to detention centers. Some, but not all, of those contracts were impacted by the cuts. However, according to White, staff at some detention centers began refusing access to all such groups, whether their work was federally funded or not.
The order was later rescinded in early February, and regular access was restored. But the episode served as a lesson in how to best navigate the second Trump administration, said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at RFK Human Rights.
“The federal government is undergoing significant restructuring and reduction right now,” he said in a Monday phone interview. “And so it seems like it’s a wise idea to help train people to deliver free and pro bono legal services without relying on federal funding.”
The group began sharing tips for navigating the immigration detention system with Acacia based on its experiences in Louisiana. Those were later incorporated into the guide.
The 30-page-guide, called “Guide to Legal Access in Immigration Detention,” was released on March 24.
The guide offers both a legal framework and practical tips for immigrant advocates.
It pulls from ICE’s own detention policies, outlined in the agency’s Performance Based National Detention Standards, as the basis for why access to legal services should be provided.
One ICE policy says its detention centers “shall permit authorized persons to make presentations to groups of detainees” for training sessions on their legal rights. ICE’s guidelines also say detention centers “shall” allow advocates and attorneys to meet privately with smaller groups of detainees to go over their individual immigration cases after presentations have been made.
“A lot of the language in the [detention standards] is very clear.” White said. “The language is powerful – it says ‘shall.’”
It also provides guidance on how to deal with ICE officials, including getting permission to enter a facility to conduct a know your rights training for detainees.
“When people have access to education and have access to information, they’re not going to feel as confused, as frustrated, as isolated,” Enriquez said. “They’re going to understand the proceedings they’re going through and how to defend their rights and ultimately that’s going to lead to a more efficient, orderly and safer environment for everybody.”
It’s really about creating and maintaining strong relationships with facility administrators and local immigration authorities, White said.
She said those relationships are even more important now that Trump, who has promised an unprecedented crackdown on alleged immigration violations, is back in office.
In Trump’s first two months in office the number of people being held in immigration detention increased by 20%, to about 48,000 in late March from about 40,000 in mid-January. A significant number of those people are being held in Louisiana, which has the second highest number of immigration detainees in the country, behind only Texas.
“Right now, these detention centers are packed,” said Gonzalez, who takes on a combination of paying and pro bono clients throughout the Southeast. “They are completely at capacity. Some are over capacity.”
Last week, the Miami Herald reported on overcrowding and poor conditions at Krome Detention Center in Miami, after a man formerly detained there released a series of videos on TikTok about the facility’s conditions upon his deportation to Mexico.
Gonzalez called the mass detention system a “monstrous” and “dystopian” crisis. He said the guide is helpful in getting more advocates inside immigration detention facilities that often lack transparency because of their remote locations.
“The more people that go to these places, the better because it fundamentally changes your perspective on life forever,” Gonzalez said.
But, he said, know your rights presentations are not a “means to an end to actually liberate the thousands of people that are in these jails. We need a mass movement.”
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