Immigration
May 31, 2001
Nun's Service to Detainees Ends When Funding Dies
LOS ANGELES - Every Tuesday for the past 18 months, Sister Sharlet Wagner has been making the 160-mile round trip from Los Angeles to the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster to advise Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees of their legal rights.
Next month, she will be phasing out the program, the first of its kind at the Lancaster facility, because the funding is ending.
"What's needed in Lancaster is something like the Florence project in Arizona," Sister Wagner said, taking a break in the morning presentation for lunch at a nearby Black Angus restaurant. "To have to travel back and forth from Los Angeles is not effective."
The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project is a coordinated effort of the immigration bar, with the cooperation of the INS and the Executive Office of Immigration Review, to provide daily legal-rights presentations and representation to detainees in Arizona. Long considered a model program, the project not only has helped detainees with their cases but has streamlined the immigration-court process.
By contrast, Sister Wagner has operated the Mira Loma program by herself, conducting rights presentations and taking on individual cases, from bail hearings to appeals.
To fund the program, she received a two-year graduate fellowship in 1999 from Loyola Law School.
She also received help from the Central American Resource Center, where she is a staff attorney, and with a grant from her congregation, Sisters of the Holy Cross.
But with the fellowship ending, Sister Wagner no longer will make her regular visits to Mira Loma. She will continue to handle some detention cases out of the Central American Resource Center's Los Angeles office.
On a recent Tuesday, two dozen detainees attended the rights presentation, filing into the rows of tan plastic chairs in Mira Loma's fluorescently lit, concrete-block chapel.
Usually, 50 or 60 detainees show up. But the detainee who had been keeping the attendance list won his freedom the week before, and no one had replaced him to notify the others that the presentation was taking place.
Speaking in Spanish and English, Sister Wagner, 38, a petite woman with short, curly brown hair, spent the morning advising detainees of their basic legal rights. Afterward, she distributed packets to the group which listed their rights, and she answered questions from the audience.
She reserved the afternoon for confidential interviews and preparing individual cases for representation before one of the three immigration courts on the premises.
The detainees' cases presented a wide cross-section of situations. Some sought political asylum, others wanted to know how to get their criminal convictions in state court overturned. Some appeared to have solid cases to remain in the United States, others did not.
One detainee from Russia wanted to know how to qualify for voluntary departure to Canada. Unlike deportation, voluntary departure is a form of relief, offered by the INS in certain cases, that allows an alien to depart the United States at his or her own expense and return at a later date without penalty.
Sister Wagner told another man, carrying a cardboard box filled with papers documenting his case, that she would talk to him later one-on-one and look over his files.
"It's not true that you need an attorney," Wagner said, holding up a standard INS notice-to-appear form. "[Many times], you can do it yourself."
To another man, a permanent resident who served time in the California Youth Authority for robbery but was convicted in adult court, Sister Wagner said his case did not look good. The INS regards an aggravated felony as automatic grounds for deportation.
In this instance, she said, leafing through the file that the young man handed her, the charge may not constitute an actual felony, but he would need a lawyer to study his record.
If it isn't a felony, she told the man, he needed a lawyer to argue the reasons before an immigration judge. If it is, he needed an attorney to go to state court and try to get the charge changed.
"I think it's worth it to get a lawyer you can trust to investigate and see if something can be done," Sister Wagner said. "If nothing can be done, it's not worth fighting it. You'll be in detention for two years fighting it."
She cautioned the group to be careful choosing a lawyer.
"No lawyer can guarantee you will win," she said. "If a lawyer does guarantee it, you should be suspicious. But a lawyer should be able to tell you if it's possible and worth the risk. If it is, you should take it."
If a detainee argues his own case, it will go faster, she said, but it is very hard to win in immigration court without a lawyer.
The U.S. government will not pay for a court-appointed lawyer in immigration cases, but detainees are allowed to find one on their own.
About 90 percent of INS detainees lack legal representation because of poverty or the remote location of the detention center, according to Christopher Nugent, executive director of the Florence Project.
For detainees in that category, the rights presentations have proved a popular alternative.
Mira Loma is a good example.
Sister Wagner said that once she had to cancel the presentation for two Tuesdays in a row. When she walked into the chapel three weeks later, about 50 detainees were waiting. They gave her a standing ovation.
The usefulness of such programs can be measured in a recent study by the Florence project, which has been operating for 12 years. That study showed that the program increased efficiency and effectiveness for immigration-rights attorneys, the INS and the immigration courts.
Using two staff attorneys and a paralegal intern, the Florence team was able to reach more detainees with its legal-rights presentations than through traditional methods, in which attorneys receive a profusion of calls from detainees and schedule individual interviews.
This process, the study showed, greatly reduced the time an immigration judge would need to explain basic rights to unrepresented aliens.
Moreover, after the first hearing, the attorneys were able to do two things: determine that 78 percent of the detainees had no case for relief beyond voluntary departure; and help the detainees understand and accept that option rather than waste time fighting it.
Sister Wagner would like to see a program similar to the Florence project set up at Mira Loma, where an average of 800 detainees are housed on any given day.
The facility, plunked on the scorched edge of the Mojave Desert, many miles from metropolitan Los Angeles, offers no easy access to lawyers. Additionally, many detainees cannot afford legal representation, and pro bono attorneys don't want to drive the long distances.
"The immigration judge will hand out a list of attorneys," Sister Wagner told the Tuesday-morning group. "That list is useless. None of them will come out here. If you want an attorney, you have to pay for it."
Local attorneys, who have made the trip to Lancaster, agree.
"It's tremendously inconvenient," Niels Frenzen, who formerly headed the immigration-rights project for Public Counsel in Los Angeles, said. "Obviously, what the issue goes to is time. For private attorneys who are charging their clients, time is money.
"For nonprofit legal agencies, they are faced with the difficult decision, 'Do we want to represent clients by traveling to Lancaster when we can spend time with clients in our offices here?' Even [the Terminal Island facility in] San Pedro seems convenient compared to Lancaster."
"It's a major problem," Frenzen, who now runs an immigration clinic at the University of Southern California Law School, said, "and not an issue that is unique to Los Angeles."
Sister Wagner has kept nine detention cases that she is handling personally, either pro bono or for a minimal fee. The Central American Resource Center, where she works, will provide detainees with a list of reputable attorneys it has dealt with. But, most are not free.
"Mira Loma needs someone who can coordinate a pro bono project, develop a pro bono list of attorneys, maybe work with a bar association," Sister Wagner said. "If I had to do it over again, that's the way I would do it."
Susan Mc Rae
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