Migrants are being held in Texas prisons for weeks without attorneys

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Hundreds of migrants arrested as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “catch and jail” security push have been in jail for weeks without charge, and dozens have been detained for more than a month with no attorney appointed .

Most of the men are Latinos and many do not speak English. Arrested at the border and dumped in prisons hundreds of miles away, they have spent weeks or months with no or no legal counsel, few opportunities to speak to their families, and often fewer opportunities to find out what is happening to them or how long they are being incarcerated .

Citing widespread violations of federal law and constitutional due process rights, which have increased as local judicial systems remain overwhelmed by the volume of arrests, defense lawyers and immigrant advocacy groups are calling on the courts to release the men.

“We cannot have a country or system in which people are rounded up and hid and hidden in this way without the oversight and rights that the constitution requires,” said Amrutha Jindal, a Houston attorney whose organization Restoring Justice, was recently hired to represent dozens of migrants. “The system is crumbling without a proper process.”

Abbott’s office did not respond to questions about the legal delays on Friday. He has continued to praise officials from the Texas Department of Public Security for the arrests and criticize the federal government’s immigration policies, which he blames for the recent increases in border crossings.

Under Texas law, defendants must be assigned a lawyer within three days of being asked. State law also requires defendants to be released from prison if prosecutors delay cases by not bringing charges quickly. For trespassing, the charge on which the vast majority of detained migrants were arrested, this period is 15 or 30 days depending on the charge.

Both deadlines fell by the wayside when Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court Justice and attorney general, pursued his initiative for the state police to arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the country for state crimes such as trespassing or people smuggling. Since the effort began in July, around 1,000 migrants have been transferred to two Texas prisons that have been converted into immigration prisons. Almost 900 men were detained on Friday, prison officials reported.

Jindal said her organization was hired a week and a half ago to represent about 50 of these men, but many were arrested in early August and spent almost six weeks in jail without a lawyer. After meeting with the men last week, she said most were not aware if they could band together and did not know how long they could expect to be incarcerated. For some, the lawyers did not yet have all of the records from the district where they were arrested.

“They had no one to tell them about their cases or their trial,” Jindal said, adding that it was the first time for most of them in the United States. “You’re just in jail and the clerk has no record of your existence.”

Kinney County, a conservative rural area near Del Rio, has seen by far the highest number of migrant arrests – that’s more than 80% of all those arrested on Friday under Abbott’s initiative. Jindal said almost all of her new clients who had been without a lawyer for weeks were arrested in Kinney and they are not unique.

Kinney County judge Tully Shahan said Thursday that some men have not requested legal assistance and even if they did, there would be no local defense lawyers to take on their cases. In a court motion filed earlier this month challenging the new criminal justice system for migrants, Texas defense lawyers and an immigration rights attorney argued that the arrested migrants were asked by local officials to sign documents waiving their right to legal assistance without consent know what to sign as the documents were in english.

Another judicial petition states that 300 men had been in jail by mid-September without trespassing charges being brought within the 15-day time limit. Most were arrested in Kinney County. The petition was filed by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, who is defending most of the arrested migrants and calling for their immediate release on free bonds.

By last week, the district attorney Brent Smith had filed criminal charges against approximately 50 to 75 men, according to the district official. Nearly 730 of the migrants in Texas prisons had been arrested in Kinney County since July.

Smith, who took office in January and has repeated anti-immigration rhetoric in memos and speaking out against migrants who allegedly caused damage to his property, did not respond to calls or emails for the story.

In neighboring Val Verde County, home of Del Rio, where the arrests of migrants began, a handful of trials – for around 15 to 20 men each – resulted in the release of defendants who either accepted offers of 15 days in detention that the migrants already received served or whose charges were dismissed. These men are being sent to federal immigration services for either deportation, further detention, or release in the United States while asylum hearings are pending.

However, according to the TRLA petition, around 50 men arrested in Val Verde county had been waiting for a formal charge for more than 15 days this month. Val Verde District Attorney David Martinez said he was unavailable to speak to the Texas Tribune on Friday.

In Kinney County, none of the hundreds of men arrested had been rescheduled since last week due to delays.

Shahan said Thursday that six court dates would be set over the next two months. He explained the delays by saying that his county was small – with only about 3,000 residents and a judicial system with few employees. He handles the county budget and operations, as well as misdemeanor cases, and Smith is the only attorney prosecuting misdemeanors.

“This has been a massive rush of people and we just had a bottleneck there,” said Shahan. “That’s not an excuse, it’s just a real problem with the numbers.”

Defense groups and district officials agree that local systems were not prepared for the massive influx of arrests. After the arrests began and legal and logistical problems quickly emerged, state officials worked behind the scenes to quickly provide legal assistance and pay legal costs. When the state discovered last month that Kinney County had processed more than a hundred men without providing lawyers, officials moved for a new state system to take initial bookings, as it did with the Val Verde arrests Case was.

However, there were long delays. To help provide defense services, the Lubbock Private Defenders Office was hired by the state in July to appoint lawyers for detained migrants. Shannon Evans, executive director of the office, said they waited weeks for paperwork from Kinney County on those initial arrests. After receiving court records, they had to sift through handwritten and unorganized court documents in order to match them to those arrested.

“There was a big gap in communication and the technology part of it [in Kinney County]“She said, adding that she believed the problem would be fixed under the new system.

But over time and more and more rifts, the hundreds of men will be left behind in jail, leading to recent court records releasing them from the new system, which is being deemed unconstitutional by defense lawyers.

“The program has created a separate and unequal criminal justice system for those suspected of illegally entering the United States,” said a motion filed in the district court earlier this month by Texas defense lawyers and a national immigration lawyer. “With this absurd alternative, constitutional rights are suspended and there is no due process.”

The motion, one of the few to be tried Tuesday in Val Verde and Kinney District Court, calls for the release of a defendant, including alleging that his detention was unconstitutional because he was 41 days without a lawyer, and state border protection initiative arrests only men who are mostly Hispanic for trespassing. In a further hearing on the same day, District Judge Roland Andrade will weigh up the TRLA’s request for the release of 300 men.

In the backlog and chaos, lawyers fear that migrants will be lost in the system. Jindal said her lawyers couldn’t find any of their assigned clients when they visited prisons last week. He was believed to have been able to clear civil liability, but there was no clear communication or documentation about it, she said, or any indication of whether the man would be deported while on prison. For other clients, she said, lawyers had difficulty finding any records describing when or why they were arrested.

“When it comes to human rights, the Constitution, the criminal justice system, it’s not really a situation where you should build the airplane while you’re flying it,” Jindal said.

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