Photo: Manuel Ocaño / Impremedia
For: Manuel Ocaño / Special for Real America News
Sunday, September 29
Immigrants receive their release from ICE on Christmas
In their cells at the Otay Mesa, California detention center, a Colombian woman and man were perhaps thinking about how their relatives would spend Christmas dinner, while they had to continue being detained in that prison private in custody of Immigration and Customs Control (ICE).
They had been detained for months, and when the guards took them out of their cells at night Thursday 23 December what they least imagined was that they were being taken out of the detention center, onto the street, free.
ICE literally left them on the street without informing them of anything else. It took time for the two released migrants, after communicating with their families, to understand that they were on probation, on bail that someone had paid for them separately.
The liberated woman’s sister, He called the lawyer who posted the bail and helped them both get out of the detention center to have dinner with their families on Christmas Eve.
” Thank you, really ”, the woman said to the lawyer by phone,“ we are going to take a family photo at Christmas dinner and we are going to send it to you, so you can see the happiness it causes us. ”
Releasing the male migrant took a little longer because ICE still tried a ruse to hold him in custody; said that the address in the judge’s authorization documents did not coincide with the one that the Colombian migrant had provided.
“But the agents changed their attitude as soon as I informed them that I am a migration lawyer, “Dulce García told Real America News.
The woman released to spend Christmas Eve with her relatives is the migrant number 100 of a surety program of the organization directed by the lawyer García, Ángeles de la Frontera. The man who was also released Thursday night has the number 101 of that show.
For the executive director of Ángeles de la Frontera, crossing the barrier of one hundred migrants released with the bond program is as important as the human aspect of the family it helps.
“The truth is, it feels horrible to have a relative in immigration detention just for not having money to pay the high amounts requested by the government,” said the lawyer, who personally experienced the same situation with the arrest of one of her siblings.
It was precisely that experience, which impacted her family, that motivated the immigration attorney to launch the program. The first immigrant released on bail from the program left the detention center on January 7, 2020.
The surety program is a plan “in which the community helps the community, it works entirely with contributions made by the community to complete the amounts needed for bonds.”
He discussed, for example, that to free the Colombian migrant this Thursday, he had initially paid a part of the bail last June, the man was only able to leave six months later, and now he will be able to continue his case free on bail in the company of your family.
Generally, the government requires bonds that are unaffordable for migrants and their families. García relies on her experience as a lawyer to obtain lower amounts that can be covered with the funds provided by the community.
In general terms, The relatives of the detained migrants contribute as much as they can to pay the bond, Ángeles de la Frontera adds funds with a ceiling of $ 5, 12 dollars that it collects from the community, and when necessary, requests support from other civil society organizations.
The lawyer usually gets the magistrates to reduce the bonds because they are migrants without resources.
The work of the surety program was especially important when the pandemic worsened in 2020 and the Otay Mesa Detention Center quickly ranked among the private prisons with the most cases of infected detainees.
Attorney García began to release mainly am Central American and some African igrants
As a coincidence, most of those who were released on bail with the program had been detained in unit J of the detention center where, according to testimonies, the eviction began to be noticed.
Garcia has also released migrants who were at the Adelanto, California detention center.
The executive director of Los Angeles de la Frontera and the surety program, Dulce García, is a dreamer, beneficiary of the Deferred Action program for those who arrived in the country during childhood, or DACA. He studied without official help in San Diego and Cleveland.