Preparation, Crisis, Struggle, Ideas

The Birth of the Detention Outreach Project

SARAH ROGERSON

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more pas­sionate than “politicians” think.

—Michel Foucault

Rooted to a plastic chair in the lobby at the Albany County Correctional Facil­ity (ACCF), a county jail in upstate New York, legs folded with the hope of channeling meditative calm, exhausted eyes desperately seeking clarity in the spreadsheets of immigrant detainees and volunteer lawyers crowding my lap­top, my gaze wanders up and out of the window carrying the seal of the Albany County Sheriff's Office. The seal's six-pointed star circles the Dutch ship that carried the original immigrant settlers to the city of Albany.¹ I had passed by that seal hundreds of times over the previous five years and never took notice of it, but it now serves as the visual symbol of one of the most impor­tant teaching moments I have ever had as a student of crisis lawyering: that if we cultivate a strong foundation of relationships and collaborations around a known threat, crisis can serve as the birthplace of transformative ideas.

One of these moments presented itself to me in week four of a crisis law­yering response to a humanitarian disaster brought on by the Donald Trump administration's zero tolerance and family separation policies at the United States-Mexico border, which were exacerbated by broken immigration laws and systems favoring mass incarceration.² On the other side of the cinder­block wall providing me this brief moment of reflection, a team of attorneys from several major law firms across the state of New York are working dili­gently to triage and provide legal information to hundreds of immigrants fleeing violence, political unrest, and persecution.

Precisely one week prior to the individuals' arrival, the Albany County Sheriff had alerted me to the possibility of a phased-in influx of immigrant detainees to his jail over a period of six to eight weeks. Immigration authori­ties told the sheriff that the detainees would arrive in groups of thirty to sixty weekly until the jail was at capacity. This phasing cadence seemed manageable given that we had organized pro bono legal responses to similar-sized groups in the past. By combining the energy of enterprising law students at Albany Law School, the goodwill of local nonprofits such as The Legal Project, the efforts of area pro bono attorney volunteers, and tapping into additional net­works of pro bono attorneys from large firms and nonprofit organizations in New York City, we had been able to manage. Because of the chaos at the border and the lack of transparency and accountability of US Customs and Border Patrol, the transfer was much more chaotic than planned.

Rather than an orderly, phased transfer, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assembled more than 300 refugees from various countries who entered at the southern border of the United States, seemingly at ran­dom, and transported them, via airplane, in groups of a hundred, to the Al­bany County Jail over the course of eight days.

It was the largest influx of detainees in the state of New York—and one of the largest nationwide—presenting a massive challenge: to provide immigra­tion legal services to an unprecedented number of individuals arriving en masse with skilled, but scarce, legal resources. Facing down this challenge would ultimately reveal points of weakness in the current immigrant legal services system in New York's capital. However, the innovation resulting from the crisis response would ultimately give birth to ideas, and leveraged grass­roots organizing systems, designed to reclaim power from the federal immi­gration punishment system and place it back in the hands of immigrants and their advocates. Further, the relationships forged between law enforcement and immigration advocates would result in unprecedented county-level real­location of punitive federal resources to restorative justice aims. In effect, the crisis that gave birth to the Detention Outreach Project would lead to some of the most rapid and progressive forms of reform in one of the most unlikely places: a county jail in upstate New York.

The Terrible Truth about Immigration Representation

Immigrants in the United States are not guaranteed legal representation at any stage of the deportation process. In fact, a process called “expedited removal” allows the government to deport certain individuals at the discretion of an individual immigration officer without being heard by an immigration judge at all.⁸ Although immigrants in the United States have the right to hire a pro bono or paid attorney, there is no universal (or even limited) free represen­tation at the federal level. The same is true even for children.⁹ New York is an outlier among states, having launched the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), carving out several million dollars of state funding to provide free representation to unrepresented immigrants who are detained and in the process of removal proceedings.¹⁰ Although NYIFUP is visionary and intrepid, its reach is limited to the most desperate stage of the removal process. Millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States would benefit from legal representation long before they are detained and the federal government actively seeks to deport them. There are few skilled immigration attorneys available generally, opening up a wide opportunity for notarios, or those engaging in the unlawful practice of law, to swindle desperate detain­ees and family members out of hard-earned dollars. Law school clinics are training future immigration attorneys, but the learning curve is steep—and the need is mounting.¹¹

And yet, the presence of a lawyer is one of the most determinative factors for the success of cases in the American immigration system. Data from studies on the impact of an attorney in the immigration process show that an individual is much more likely to gain immigration status and/or defend against deportation if they are represented by counsel?² Furthermore, immigrants often face life- or-death consequences as a result of deportation, particularly asylum-seekers, who may be killed by their persecutors if returned to their country of origin?³

Civil immigration violations are increasingly met with consequences that mirror the criminal justice system in America, and the potential harm result­ing from deportation in many cases is death.

Unwitting Preparation: Forging Partnerships and Creating

Best Practices

This particular crisis response would not have been as effective without a longstanding relationship between Albany Law School and the Albany County Sheriff's Office (with the consent of DHS). Five years prior, Chris Scoville, a law student, approached me with the little-known fact that immi­grant detainees were being held in the local county jail. He wanted to explore ways that law students might effectively intervene in these cases. After doing some preliminary research, we discovered that a detainee had actually died in custody at the jail due to a combination of preexisting conditions and lack of access to medication as a result of a series of miscommunications between DHS and jail administration?⁵ The case was the subject of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). After the suit was settled, the jail's improvements to its medical care and protocols were so significant that it was presented with an award by the ACLU shortly thereafter.

Nevertheless, I was not optimistic that the jail administration and the sheriff would be receptive to the idea of expanding legal information to im­migrant detainees held in the facility. I challenged the students to create a pitch for a project under the new DHS “Parental Interest Directive,” which was created under Barack Obama's administration in 2013 to operationalize certain procedures to allow parents to make arrangements for their children after being detained, including being present for any family court proceed­ings so that they did not lose their parental rights in absentia.¹⁶ At the time, family separation by immigration authorities was not what we think of today.

We were welcomed into the jail to present our ideas, the students and I nervous with anticipation of an unknown outcome. Much to our surprise, when the students finished their presentation, the sheriff's response was simple: “This is a no-brainer.” We were all caught a little off-guard, but the sheriff embraced the idea and offered to help us obtain approval from DHS, which the jail would need in order to proceed as planned. As it turned out, convincing DHS would be a much more difficult undertaking due to the lay­ers of bureaucracy required for the approval of this type of project. Once the final terms of our participation were negotiated, however, we were soon in the jail on a fairly regular basis, screening individuals picked up locally to see whether they needed to make arrangements for their children.

Over time, my communications with the sheriff expanded to other issues of immigrant safety and local policy. In tandem, I became an unofficial liai­son between the private immigration bar, pro bono attorneys, and the local DHS leadership. We also partnered with free legal service providers at a local nonprofit (The Legal Project), whose attorneys and immigration legal profes­sionals agreed to cover the intakes when the students were not in session or were otherwise unavailable. As we built trust between the jail and our project over time, one seemingly mundane but eventually critical development would serve as the logistical lynchpin for our operations in crisis: I was added to the list of individuals who received a list of immigrants being held by the jail for DHS every single morning. Early in the project, this allowed my students to track enforcement trends and to identify when we needed to make arrange­ments for trips into the jail. When crisis hit, these lists were our only window into the identities behind the souls DHS decided to transfer to the jail.

Beyond these menial lists, however, as advocates/attorneys on one side and law enforcement on the other, working through operational issues to­gether (even and especially when it was uncomfortable), we created trusting relationships that would also turn out to be critical. Over the years, I would slowly accumulate the names, e-mails, and direct phone numbers of the in­dividuals responsible for various things at DHS and at the jail. When private practitioners raised concerns about the strip-searching of immigrant women housed in the jail, we were able to carry their concerns to DHS and the jail administration, resolving the issue without exposing the complainant or en­gaging in expensive litigation tactics.

By and large, by working together, we were able to convert what could oth­erwise be a delicate land mine of mistrust and obstruction into a constructive relationship, realizing, of course, that each of us was operating within our own constraints and agendas. Upon reflection, these years of sporadic yet productive interactions not only were exceptional in nature but also proved critical in crisis.

As these relationships evolved, the students worked under my supervision to develop best practices for the project, which would become key instru­ments for success in crisis. First, students collected model intake protocols from immigrant detention outreach projects across the country, consolidated them, and then tailored them to the needs of the individuals that we most often encountered in the jail—largely Hispanic/Latinx individuals with myr­iad challenges to bonding out of detention to pursue lawful status. They also gathered a list of referral resources so that if individuals did not meet the criteria to benefit from the parental interest directive, we might direct them to other legal resources available to them, depending on their particular issue. Second, students developed a number of documents and releases, translated into Spanish, in order to be able to empower the individuals they met with additional information and connect them to resources.

In addition, the students began tracking the limited information we received from the individuals to identify systemic trends, which then fed into the pri­orities of the local advocacy coalition and pro bono networks to identify and implement systemic interventions. Some of these interventions were more suc­cessful than others, but essentially, the jail project became a hub of information that fed into the advocacy work of the immigrant rights community in ways that were not necessarily obvious or threatening to law enforcement.

After years of careful work and additional trust-building, we took one ad­ditional step that would allow for more fulsome use and development of the best practices developed by students and would lead to the creation of ad­ditional critical resources. After a regional program providing “Know Your Rights” presentations to individuals inside the jail ended, I approached DHS with the idea of formally expanding our project beyond the reach of the pa­rental interest directive and into a model of intake and referral. Using the same intake protocol and the resources compiled and refined over the years, we were able to tailor the project to the shifting needs of the population as different groups ended up in the jail for different reasons with different legal needs. After some back-and-forth, DHS ultimately approved the project modification. This unshackled the project from its former, more limited scope and provided us the flexibility we would need for a crisis response.

Notably, and importantly, best practices being developed in other cri­sis lawyering scenarios across the state and nation would also enhance and deepen the impact of our response locally. This brings into focus the impor­tance of another partnership that was not so much unlikely as it was under­utilized. The regional collaborative had worked with a statewide immigrant advocacy network, the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), to provide joint trainings on a host of issues but had not yet had the opportunity to collaborate more substantively with the actual provision of legal services in the area. The NYIC is not a legal services organization; instead, it focuses on advocacy, generating funding, and supporting the legislative campaigns of its member organizations.

However, the immigration legal policy director at the NYIC, Camille Mackler, and I had become collaborators on a few smaller projects. Camille had recently organized a massive on-site legal response at JFK International Airport (JFK) on the same morning that the Trump administration's “Mus­lim Ban” went into effect in late January 2017, which garnered widespread national news attention.¹⁸ As part of that massive pro bono attorney effort, Camille and her team at JFK had developed a number of crisis response pro­tocols and technologies that will continue to inform these moments for as long as our immigration system remains this broken. Having had some time to reflect on the potential and pitfalls of those systems and technologies, Ca­mille brought her perspective and experience to bear in Albany. Without her experience and generosity in sharing the resources that the JFK team built, we could not have been as successful as we were.

Outside of New York, attorney Stephen Manning was quietly building what is now one of the most powerful grassroots tools for immigration crisis lawyering and immigration advocacy created to date: a crowd-sourced case management system. His organization, Innovation Law Lab, has a bold mis­sion statement that strives to counterbalance the gap in representation for refugees seeking asylum in the United States:

We envision a world where every case that should win, does win, every time, everywhere. We work where the threat is greatest—where people and legal sys­tems are most vulnerable to attack. We are deployed in immigrant detention centers and hostile judicial jurisdictions across the United States.

Like the NYIFUP program, Innovation Law Lab focuses on cases where individuals are detained and in active removal proceedings. During the JFK crisis, Camille had relied on Innovation Law Lab's powerful case management technology to allow multiple attorney volunteers to assist on dozens of cases in real time, in collaboration with one another, as details emerged. Paired with the power of Zen Desk, a hotline management technology with infor­mation sharing capabilities, this dual engine fueled a mass legal response for nearly two weeks at JFK with hundreds of volunteer lawyers working around the clock. These two developments, along with the power of the team com­munications app Slack, would provide the infrastructure for each major piece of the DOP's crisis response in Albany.

In so many ways, each immigration crisis that emerges anywhere in the country lends itself to new ideas for the next crisis. In effect, as each crisis plays out, the partnerships that Camille developed at JFK, and the technolo­gies that Stephen developed in Oregon, are building a rapid response system that can be deployed anytime, anywhere, and within hours begin coordinat­ing and applying thousands of hours of volunteer attorney power to bear on the immediate crisis moment. It was truly serendipity that we in Albany were able to benefit from this immensely powerful collaboration and, as will be discussed later, contribute meaningfully to the development of a larger crisis­response resistance machine. Without the foundation of these relationships and best practices, forged in the heat of crisis, the DOP would not have been as successful. With them, we were nearly unstoppable.

The Crisis and Struggle: Beyond Palliative Care

To understand the true impact of these relationships and the importance of incorporating the lessons learned from prior crisis collaborations, it is impor­tant to start at the very birth of the DOP. Riding in the quiet car of an Amtrak train, attempting to begin drafting this chapter, and on the way to teach a high school summer intensive course on immigration with Camille and journalist Liz Robbins from the New York Times, I received a phone call from the Albany County Sheriff. It being the quiet car, I darted to the nearest acceptable location to receive a telephone call—the bathroom. Huddled in the Amtrak quiet car's water closet, phone pressed up to one ear and a hand over the other, I heard the sheriff provide the details of the arriving influx of immigrants to the Albany County Correction Facility(ACCF). He then asked if I thought we could help. I told him I would need to check with our community partners but that I was pretty sure that we could. We set some ground rules to keep the details private and avoid press attention until we had a plan.¹⁹ It was a call that would alter the trajectory of my summer, my career, and ultimately, this chapter. Because I was literally on my way to see Camille, she was among the first people I reached out to about the news from the sheriff. This would become critical as the crisis intensified and our existing protocols and initial resources would quickly col­lapse under the weight of the work ahead.

The irony is that the DOP and all that we would learn from it narrowly dodged extinction just days before. A local activist and I were mulling over the possibility of approaching the sheriff with a plan to phase out the board­ing of immigrants and banning immigration authorities from the ACCF alto­gether. Our argument would be a moral one. We had hit a point in our project where the students were completely dejected. Although we were screening individuals for relief, none was available for most. As a result, the conversa­tions would inevitably shift to a sort of palliative care: Were they receiving their medicine on a regular basis? Did they have access to clean underwear and feminine hygiene products? How were they being treated by the jail staff? Did they have contacts in the country that they were being deported to and did they have a way to support themselves? Would they mind telling us about their apprehension by ICE agents so that we could track trends and poten­tially help others?

It was brutally difficult work because it rarely felt like we were doing any­thing other than offering a bit of humanity in a desperately lacking process. Not that there isn't value in that kind of work, but as attorneys, we are used to being able to deliver a lot more to our clients. It was not hitting the marks for my law students' learning goals, and it wasn't really helping anyone achieve the goal of remaining in the United States. It felt like we were complicit, like we had become part of the system.

Less than forty-eight hours before that fateful quiet-car call, I was ready to try something more drastic: convince the sheriff that he is part of the problem and ask that he consider removing himself from the system altogether by refus­ing to board immigrants in his jail. I thought that we could make a compelling case, and I knew enough about his progressive agenda of lowering recidivism and diminishing the general jail population through critical interventions that I thought it was worth a shot—especially if we were thinking of pulling out of the project. I was considering coordinating this ask with the local “Abol­ish ICE” movement, called “ICE-Free Capital District.” Together, I thought we could convince him that he was complicit and that the only morally justifiable thing to do would be to refuse to participate in the deportation machine.

Once faced with a national border emergency, disgusting conditions at the temporary facilities meant to house many fewer detainees near the bor­der, and the subsequent transfer of more than 300 asylum-seekers away from those conditions and into the more humane environment of the ACCF, that calculation shifted. Without our legal interventions, many would have failed their Credible Fear Interview (CFI), which is the very first step in the asylum process, and many would be mistreated in a private federal detention facil­ity without any medical care, without religious accommodations, and, most important, without legal counsel. Our impact was tangible, and we believed in our interventions because they produced favorable outcomes for the cli­ents. Rather than acting in a more passive role in a broken system, the work was disruptive and impactful—ultimately leading to the release of many from immigration custody and control. We knew we were doing the “right thing.”

Week One: Relationships and Technologies Pave the Way for Success

That first week was critical. Camille and I formed a small team of project managers, including Meredith Fortin, the director of immigration services support at the NYIC, as well as other JFK veteran volunteers, including Priya Gandhi, a lawyer who happens to excel at volunteer coordination and was willing to dedicate her free time pro bono. From New York City to Albany to London to Canada, our fledgling group began to plan. We knew we would need to dramatically scale up The Legal Project's existing pro bono recruit­ment efforts. We knew that a parallel effort to recruit skilled and experienced interpreters and translators, potentially in a number of different languages, would be part of the volunteer coordination effort. It soon occurred to me that the best way to harness the pro bono power in our area without a full­time legal coordinator (or any at all) had already been implemented by my son's elementary school Parent Teacher Organization. The volunteer organi­zation platform, Sign-Up Genius, was the perfect tool for the job. A team of administrators could set up web pages that were very easy to disseminate via an automatically generated web link, offering volunteers the ability to sign up for shifts and roles as they were willing and able.

Volunteers literally poured out from every corner of the Capital District. That was the good news. The bad news was that we had no easy way to vet them for immigration law fluency, language fluency, or experience, and there was no easy way to pair them with interpreters and translators who were flu­ent in the languages spoken by the individuals seen during their appointed shifts. As a result, our core team familiarized ourselves with the various fea­tures of Sign-Up Genius to take better advantage of all the platform had to offer. Anticipating that many volunteers may not be immigration lawyers (and, in fact, most weren't), I had created a brief logistical and substantive training using Prezi, the online platform for presentations, which also could be shared easily via web link. Rather than hosting a PowerPoint on a website or mailing it to each volunteer individually, we could embed the link to the training into Sign-Up Genius and also in an auto-response to the volunteer coordination email, immediately providing our volunteers with self-guided basics upon sign-up. We were also able to use many of the resources students had already created, like the intake form and releases, so that we had a uni­form method for all volunteers to use to gather the information we needed.

Shortly thereafter, Camille negotiated with Slack, the mobile and web­based team communication app, to provide us a free account in order to streamline our communications. These discoveries also happened to coin­cide with a critical connection (again, via Camille) to the Association of Pro Bono Counsel, a “mission-driven membership organization of over 200 at­torneys and practice group managers who run pro bono practices in over 100 of the world's largest law firms.”²⁰ Specifically, Harlene Katzman and Saralyn Cohen, pro bono counsel at the powerhouse law firms Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, LLP and Shearman & Sterling, LLP respectively. Harlene and Saralyn connected us, through APBCo, to a nearly unlimited supply of pretrained at­torney volunteers, many of whom were trained in the protocols for refugees at the border and were eager to apply their skills closer to home. Those who were not trained would be trained by their firms, lessening the burden on us, the volunteer coordination team. Unfortunately, this meant that we ultimately turned away local attorney volunteers, but the benefits were massive: we were able to book multiple shifts at a time with the same attorneys who would take the train or fly in from their firms in order to help, providing continuity and stability to the project and avoiding the need to continuously respond to basic volunteer inquiries. As the DOP evolved and as new volunteer efforts needed to be rolled out, these early lessons proved invaluable.

Pinch-Points: Volunteer Coordination and Data Management

Of course, in crisis lawyering, once you solve one set of problems, another set develops. The next problem to solve: we had assumed written instructions to the volunteers would suffice, but it became very clear, very quickly that more complicated issues kept arising on the visitation floor. For example, volun­teers did not have a way to communicate those issues to our team prior to the conclusion of their shift, leading to incomplete information and/or guid­ance to the detainee and leading to inefficiencies due to multiple detainees requiring additional volunteer visits. Another problem: our volunteers were collecting large amounts of information from multiple detainees each day, and we had no place to store it, organize it, and analyze it.

The first problem had a relatively easy solution: we began assigning expe­rienced immigration attorney volunteers to serve as site supervisors for each shift. The site supervisors were there to answer questions from volunteers, manage the flow of detainee visits with the jail staff, and handle any on-site problems, such as volunteer names being omitted from the gate clearance list at the jail and other technical difficulties. My colleagues at Albany Law School and law schools across the state, and an overwhelming number of experi­enced nonprofit immigration lawyers, took time away from their crushing workloads to dive into ours. There were times when the statewide and com­munity support were completely awe-inspiring, but I had to wonder what might happen if these detainees had been placed in a less-resourced state. If, for example, these 300-plus individuals had landed in South Carolina or Mis­sissippi, the situation might have been much different.

The data problem was much more complicated. Laptops and phones ini­tially were not permitted in the visitation space. (We would later negotiate a change in that policy.) As a result, everything had to be completed on paper. This meant that each volunteer attorney had to print out her or his own in­take form, write legibly, and deposit it at the nearby offices of The Legal Proj­ect, which had offered to organize the data gathered until we had a more permanent solution. Our early data management efforts were the epitome of the phrase “building the plane while flying it.” Between volunteers lag­ging in dropping off the forms and a lack of real-time information regarding which detainees were being seen, the plane was veering off-course. We real­ized that we needed a secure place inside the jail to store intake documents, volunteer information, and completed forms. So again, we called upon our ever-evolving relationship with the sheriff, and he offered a solution: a set of lockers, drilled into the wall in the lobby, that only we would have the keys to, along with a coded lockbox to store an extra set of keys for shift volunteers. It was an elegant solution to a pressing need. The DOP team often joked about how ridiculously critical a set of lockers became for confidential data man­agement when we were working with so many other high-tech experiments. The lockers were half of the solution; Innovation Law Lab provided the other.

Innovation Law Lab

With hundreds of clients and hundreds of lawyers in the constellation of the DOP, we needed a case management plan very early on. Within a week, Camille had secured a client management database from Innovation Law Lab to help us self-organize. Innovation Law Lab's database is an example of an idea forged in crisis. It is software that originally was developed in 2014 to manage the detention crisis at a family detention facility in Artesia, New Mexico, where thousands of women and children were detained until, using Innovation Law Lab's crowd-sourcing software, the asylum win rate exceeded 90 percent and the facility shut down.²¹ The programmers, engi­neers, and attorneys that fuel the development of Innovation Law Lab, which is constantly evolving, are part of an iterative process of regular feedback that ultimately influences the design of the database to make it more responsive and user-friendly. Ultimately, Stephen Manning's goal with the Innovation Law Lab is to “crowdsource a refugee rights strategy.’^ In a sense, it is the prototypical example of an idea forged on the front lines of crisis that has the potential to revolutionize refugee rights advocacy and crisis lawyering.

Credible Fear, Zen Desk, and Remote Crisis Lawyering

In the first two weeks, we had interviewed more than half of the detainees. We knew that because they had not been fully processed at the border, they had not received their Credible Fear Interview, the first step in the longer process of seeking asylum in the United States. We would need to launch another phase of the project to make sure that all of the individuals we screened who were eligible for a CFI received one. We followed Stephen's lead, using the exact same Credible Fear Protocol that Innovation Law Lab used in the vari­ous family detention centers in which they operate, building on their best practices and implementing them for our purposes.

However, unlike the CFI process at the border, where asylum officers in­terview the detainees in person, and because Albany was located thousands of miles from the southern border typically staffed for those purposes, we learned that the CFIs would be conducted remotely, over the phone, through the Arlington Asylum Office in Virginia. This presented yet another challenge. Because the asylum officers would not be in the room with our clients, they were uncomfortable with attorneys being in the room. Alternatively, they were willing to allow attorneys to dial in to monitor the CFIs, explain their relation­ship with me (counsel of record) and the project, and take notes. This was a compromise we were willing to strike because the only other record of the CFI interview would be the notes that the asylum officers wrote down, which would not be provided to us or the clients until a decision had been made on whether they had passed the interview. The trick was to line up a bank of remote attor­ney volunteers and set up a central call center for all parties to dial in to.

Yet another JFK-tested platform came to our aid: Zen Desk. This software creates a single number that can be provided to multiple parties that auto­matically routes the call to standby volunteers sitting at dedicated phone lines. Our Albany Law School staff, NYIC partners, and pro bono lawyers at Shear­man & Sterling stepped in once again to assist with staffing the hotline. This time, they didn't have to leave the comfort of their home offices. After a num­ber of initial hurdles, including technology issues and human error (some of the asylum officers were slow adopters of the hotline model), we eventually were able to obtain real-time information as the CFIs occurred. This remote lawyering model, we hoped, might provide a way for more attorneys to be virtually present for CFIs all over the country. Ultimately, we achieved a posi­tive CFI outcome for more than 90 percent of the cases we represented—well beyond the national average.

The Toll That Crisis Takes and the Ethic of Community Care

The early days of the DOP crisis response were not only operationally dif­ficult but also pragmatically challenging and emotionally draining. Out of necessity, our core team forged an ethic of community care to sustain what we knew would be an intense lawyering response that would span many weeks, if not months. As it turned out, we would ultimately be functioning at a fairly high level of intensity for the first three months, tapering off in the last three until the last of the detainees were transferred out of the jail. Much of the intensity centered on the core team, particularly the project leads (myself included), the data team, and the volunteer coordination team. We decided early on that we would all allow for core team members to take their planned summer vacations, celebrate milestones, and, at times, be taken off of the project for an evening or two to take time away. We celebrated team victories, no matter how small, and we acknowledged when members of the team were facing pressures outside of the DOP.

It is remarkable that, within an all-volunteer effort, we were able to forge a relentless dedication to the project while also making sure that we cared for each other's well-being—in addition to the well-being of the people we were serving. We made a collective decision to augment our legal services with the coordination of religious services and the distribution of sacred texts, ad­ditional mental health support services, and the delivery of greeting cards distributed in several different languages during the holidays. We broached the topic of self-care and vicarious trauma with the sheriff and his jail admin­istration, making some inroads and learning that there were some programs in place for jail employees. There are many more lessons yet to learn from this particular piece of the story, but at its core, our ethic of community care may have been a response to a shared suffering, which was felt not only by us and our clients but also by those tasked with incarcerating them.

New Ideas: Shared Suffering, from Abolish ICE to the Abolish Prisons Movements

Outside the lobby of the jail's administrative offices, there is a series of plaques hanging from the buff-colored cinderblock wall. On a particularly hectic day in the thick of our operation, the jail superintendent's administrative assis­tant stops midsentence and points at the photos on the wall: “suicide, suicide, suicide, overdose, motorcycle accident, drank himself to death, suicide, sui­cide, overdose... In ten seconds, she perfectly articulated the profoundly upsetting reality that the entire system of incarceration is constructed within a framework of shared suffering: those incarcerated, those who care about them, and those who are hired to keep watch over them.

In the immigrant rights community, we often talk about the toll that pro­longed detention takes on the individuals detained, their loved ones, and es­pecially families—whether they are detained as a unit or separately.²³ Less often discussed, but an area of recent inquiry, is the toll that removal defense takes on the attorneys tasked to defend the detained?⁴ And an even lesser- known measure of shared suffering is that one in five corrections officers suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, a rate higher than Iraq and Af­ghanistan war veterans and much higher than rank-and-file police officers?⁵

One of the most unexpected outcomes of the partnership established with the jail staff was the level of detail we would ultimately learn about their per­sonal lives and struggles. The administration used a lot of overtime to provide enough officers to facilitate attorney visits with multiple detainees from eight­thirty in the morning until nine in the evening, sometimes on the weekends. From union and national politics, to family matters, to whiskey and avocado toast preferences, the small talk in the spaces between the work and the lo­gistics provided rarely glimpsed insight into the lives of corrections officers. The humanization of individuals who are so easily written off as cogs in the prison industrial complex machinery created a cognitive dissonance for many politically progressive volunteers that proved more inspiring than distracting. It wasn't as though the volunteers became incarceration sympathizers, but many learned that, on difficult days when things get overwhelming inside the walls of a jail, it helps to find some common ground outside of the pain.

These discussions resulted in additional ideas and, eventually, programs that would impact the entire jail population, not just the immigrants. For ex­ample, when discussing progressive criminal justice reform initiatives in other states around the country, the sheriff disclosed that he was in the early stages of envisioning a new approach to reentry that, unlike other programs around New York, would begin at booking, rather than at release. He would also con-

vert some corrections officers positions into reentry caseworker positions. The caseworkers would be matched with an individual being booked into the jail and would help them create a reentry plan to be executed upon release.

It was serendipity that Elena Kilcullen, a student in my Poverty Law class who also was pursuing a joint degree in social work, had disclosed that creat­ing just such a program was her career goal. During a previous internship, she had created a reentry manual for Albany County that she hoped would serve as the foundation for a program. Prior to the crisis, I had passed along her reentry manual to the sheriff, so he was familiar with her work. Postcrisis, the sheriff put Elena in touch with the jail personnel responsible for executing his vision for the “New Beginnings” reentry program, and she was able to cre­ate an independent study project that would allow her to revisit her manual, build on it, and convert it to an electronic format for ease of access by the men and women in the jail through wireless tablets that the sheriff provided through his contract with a communications firm.²⁶ She is now employed by the Sheriff's Office to implement the program.

This is one small example where a conversation about immigrant justice as racial justice during a moment of crisis downtime small talk gave birth to innovative ideas and collaborations. It's one step toward a broader shared agenda that has emerged in a series of conversations with the sheriff around reduction of the prison population through drastic reform of traditional cor­rections modalities within the ACCF. The goal: shrink the population and reduce recidivism in order to literally begin tearing down the older portions of the jail facility. The method: convert corrections into a more holistic, sus­tainable, and independence-centered reentry model, rather than one of pun­ishment and containment. This is a critical component of the new Abolish Prisons movement, and I imagine that few in that movement have considered encountering willing partners in law enforcement?⁷

A related conversation emerging from this moment of crisis returns us to where we were forty-eight hours before that fateful call in the Amtrak quiet car: whether keeping bed space open for immigrant detainees empowers the immigration enforcement regime more than it disrupts it, even when part of filling the bed space includes better treatment than other facilities and the provision of legal services not available elsewhere. Postcrisis conversations among the advocacy team and with the sheriff were reminiscent of where we started just before the crisis hit: Does the value we provide by keeping the jail beds open to ICE outweigh the human suffering we enable by not taking a harder line on the issue? Recently, the sheriff took a stand, informing ICE that he would no longer house detainees without a valid judicial warrant, which has brought the population to zero.

The End Is the Beginning

The birth of ideas eventually results in the spawning of etiological reflec­tions. How might we have come upon these ideas more quickly? What are the conditions under which we might come up with even better ideas building on those born of this moment? One consideration from the birth of the DOP is whether we could have been more intentional about building the relation­ships between the Albany Law School, the sheriff and jail administration, DHS, and community partners.

We certainly are doing so now.

The crisis in Albany ended just before Christmas, when the remaining de­tainees were transferred to the federal immigration detention facility in Bata­via. But much of the work continues without the pressing crisis of new arrivals needing to be screened and prepped. We are exploring how to use the models we have developed to assist other areas of the country still receiving larger in­fluxes of individuals from the border—mostly in the South, but also in southern New York and northern New Jersey. One of the most exciting developments was that our team convinced the sheriff to lobby the Albany County Legislature to rededicate a small portion of the more than $4 million of federal funding paid to the county to board the immigrants to a budget line in the sheriff's bud­get, with the idea that he would subcontract with a local legal services agency to have a full-time immigration attorney working for the Sheriff's Office.²⁸ If the unthinkable happens again, we can restart our own disruptive, injustice­righting machine with a full-time attorney lead and organizer on the ground from day one. That lawyer will not be left alone to serve in the wild but will ben­efit from a group of seasoned crisis leaders—ready to tackle the next challenge, birth ideas, and build useful new tools with every unexpected twist and turn.

This is a new kind of crisis lawyering. It is a kind of lawyering that can't an­ticipate every challenge, but it can produce and reproduce effective disruption leveraging tools by partnering with the very same people we've been told will fight us at every turn. By lawyering this way, we will find opportunity, trust, and a deeper dedication to the clients we serve because of the personal invest­ments and ideological risks we choose to take. Crisis can be a revolutionary gift—if only we are brave enough to accept it.

NOTES

Epigraph. didier eribon, michel Foucault 282 (1991) (quoting Michel Foucault, corriere della sera, Nov. 1978).

1 See N.Y. Jud. Law § 30-d (McKinney 2019); Albany County Sheriff, Albany Cty., www.albanycounty.com.

See Memorandum from Kevin K. McAleenan, Comm'n, U.S. Customs & Border Prot., L. Francis Cissna, Dir., U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Servs., Thomas D. Homan, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enf't, to Kirstjen Nielsen, Sec'y, U.S. Dep't of Homeland Sec., Increasing Prosecutions of Immigration Violations (Apr. 23, 2018), www.documentcloud.org/documents/4936568-FOIA- 9-23-Family-Separation-Memo.html. This memo and others related to the crisis surfaced long after its height and only after significant prodding by Congress and the press. See Jeremy Stahl, Newly Uncovered Memo Suggests Kirstjen Nielsen Lied to Congress About Family Separation, Slate (Sept. 25, 2018), https://slate.com.

Southern Border in Our NY: Lawyers Screen 300+ Asylum Seekers in 1 Month at Albany Jail, N.Y. Immigr. Coalition (Jul. 31, 2018), www.nyic.org.

See Brendan J. Lyons, Many of the Immigrants at Albany County Jail Seeking Asylum, Times Union (Jul. 2, 2018), www.timesunion.com.

See Immigration & Nationality Act § 208(a)(1); 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1) (2012). See, e.g., Miriam Jordan, Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported, N.Y. Times (Jan. 17, 2019), www.nytimes.com. Tim Williams, Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple and Sarah Rogerson on the Immigrant Detainees in Albany County, Capitol Newsroom: WCNY 3:03-3:50 p.m. (July 12, 2018), www.wcny.org.

Immigration and Nationality Act 235(c), 8 U.S.C. 1225(c) (2012).

See C.J.L.G. v. Sessions, 880 F.3d 1122, 1129 (9th Cir. 2018); J.E.F.M. v. Lynch, 837 F.3d 1026 (9th Cir. 2016).

New York Immigration Family Unity Project, Bronx Defs., www.bronxdefenders. org.

Albany Law School Launches Immigration Law Clinic to Provide Free Legal Representation to Immigrants in the Capital Region, Alb. L. ScH. (Apr. 9, 2015), www.albanylaw.edu.

Detained immigrants, and those formerly detained who were released, repre­sented by counsel were respectively ten-and-a-half times and five-and-a-half times more likely to succeed in removal proceedings than their than unrepre­sented counterparts. Ingrid Early & Steven Shafer, Access to Counsel in Immigration Court 19 (2016).

See Maria S. as Next Friend for E.H.F. v. Garza, No. 17-40873, 2019 WL 101868 (5th Cir. Jan. 4, 2019); Sarah Stillman, When Deportation Is a Death Sentence, The New Yorker (Jan. 15, 2018), www.newyorker.com.

Jennifer M. Chacon, Overcriminalizing Immigration, 102 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 613 (2012); Kevin R. Johnson, An Immigration Gideon for Lawful Permanent Residents, 122 Yale L.J. 2394, 2405-14 (2013); Sarah Rogerson, The Politics of Fear: Unaccompanied Immigrant Children and the Case of the Southern Border, 61 Vill. L. Rev. 843 (2016).

See, e.g., Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, Albany County Makes $1.1M Deal to End Jail Death Lawsuit, Times Union (Apr. 20, 2016), www.timesunion.com.

16 The Trump Administration revoked the Obama Administration’s 2013 memo regarding the Parental Interests Directive and replaced it with another policy that provides fewer protections. See U.S. Immigration & Customs Enf’t, Policy Number 11064.2, Detention and Removal of Alien Parents or Legal Guardians, www.ice.gov.

17 Seth Freed Wessler, Applied Research Ctr., Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System 22-25, 42-43 (2011), www.raceforward.org.

18 See Wale Aliyu, Coalition of Volunteers, Attorneys Camp Out at JFK in Wake of Trump Ban, NBC N.Y. (Jan 30, 2017), www.nbcnewyork.com.

19 Joseph De Avila, County Jail in New York Receives Hundreds of Asylum Seekers, Wall St. J. (Jul. 16, 2018), www.wsj.com.

20 Ass’n Pro Bono Couns., https://apbco.org.

21 The Artesia Report, Innovation L. Lab, https://innovationlawlab.org/ the-artesia-report.

22 Stephen Manning, How to Crowdsource a Refugee Rights Strategy— Tedx Mt. Hood, YouTube (June 29, 2016), www.youtube.com/ watch?time_continue=3&v=iX9fizsJfuU.

23 See J. M. von Werthern et al., The Impact of Immigration Detention on Mental Health: A Systematic Review, 18 BMC Psychiatry 382, 396 (2018); Luis H. Zayas & Laurie Cook Heffron, Disrupting Young Lives: How Detention and Deportation Affect US-born Children of Immigrants, Am. Psychol. Ass’n: CYf Newsletter (Nov. 2016), www.apa.org.

24 See Lin Piwowarczyk et al., Secondary Trauma in Asylum Lawyers, 14 Bender’s Immigr. Bull. 263 (2009).

25 Ruth Delaney et al., Vera Inst. Just., Reimagining Prison 28 (2018), https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/ reimagining-prison-print-report/legacy_downloads/Reimagining-Prison_ FINAL2_digital.pdf.

26 See Jim Franco, Sheriff: New Beginnings Will Change the Ending, Spotlight News (Jan. 24, 2019), www.spotlightnews.com.

27 See Ruari Arrieta-Kenna, Abolish Prisons’ Is the New Abolish ICE’, Politico (Aug. 15, 2018), www.politico.com.

28 Mallory Moench, Albany County Using Federal Funds to Pay for Legal Help to Immigrants in the County Jail, Times Union (Nov. 14, 2018), www.timesunion. com.