Part II - Experiences of Women Detained at Karnes Population Change at Karnes and Accompanying Demographic Shifts

TING WITH ICE &

AICES must coordinate with ICE and GEO to address sues regarding clients cases, prison policies, etc.

ADVOCACY RE: MISTREATMENT Advocacy regarding mistreatment suffered in detention may take many forms such as legal/media action or advocating for some immediate improvement.

s negative CFI decision is a rmed at their hearing, they may submit or Reconsideration in which an y typically submits a new legal declaration.

8PM FINISHING CASE WORK Checking consent forms, making the next day’s visitation list etc.

PREPARING FOR THE REVIEW OF A NEGATIVE CFI DECISION Clients who receive a negative CFI decision may request review by an immigration judge, this process requires extensive preparation. 8PM

Visitation Ends Staff leaves Karnes and continues to work in the car

This section of the report will provide context to illuminate how both the circumstances of the population change from families to single adult women at Karnes, and the experiences of women in CBP custody prior to their arrival at Karnes exacerbated access to counsel concerns and negative case outcomes for the adult women population.

Karnes is managed by a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) called Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Under the guise of national security concerns, ICE-ERO rarely gives notice of transfers, removals, or changes in the population of those detained, and provided no public notice or notice to RAICES that ICE would shift from detaining families to adults at Karnes. Instead, in March of 2019, RAICES staff began to hear rumors from families who stated that GEO guards or ICE officers told them that Karnes would soon be empty. By April 1, 2019, the Family Detention Services team learned that ICE had begun to detain adult women in Karnes. Despite the presence of the new population, ICE continued to detain a few families with ongoing cases. During this transition period, ICE restricted the hours during which staff could meet with families versus when they could meet with adult women, regardless of the client’s needs, legal or otherwise. As such, access to counsel for newly detained women was limited. As of April 10, 2019, all families were released from Karnes.

From April 1, 2019 to September 30, 2019, RAICES met with approximately 2,891 women detained in Karnes. On any given day, RAICES’ caseload on any given day could be as high as 1,200 individuals. Where families detained at Karnes from 2014-2019 were primarily from the so-called “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with occasional groups of Brazilian and Haitian families, the adult women population was from a more diverse group of countries.22

Though the majority of clients reported Spanish as their primary language (94%), with the remaining 6%

22. RAICES did not meet with every person detained during this period, therefore some nationalities may be underrepresented or missing entirely from this data set.