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Bette Stockton, a retired San Francisco immigration judge and current volunteer for Catholic Charities’ Refugee and Immigrant Services program, and Amanda McArthur, an immigration legal counselor in the same department, discuss their experiences visiting the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
June 7, 2018
Christina Gray
Two Catholic Charities co-workers who worked as intake volunteers at the country’s largest immigrant detention center in April returned home to San Francisco humbled after a week of listening to the stories of families literally running for their lives from gang or domestic violence in Central America and Mexico.
On their own time and dime, Bette Stockton, a retired San Francisco immigration judge and current volunteer for Catholic Charities’ Refugee and Immigrant Services program, and Amanda McArthur, an immigration legal counselor in the same department, traveled to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
Twelve hours a day for a week, they and other trained volunteers of the CARA Pro Bono Project, a nonprofit legal consortium, packed into a double-wide trailer on the perimeter of the detention facility and talked to the women about the fears that propelled them to grab their children and run, often with only the clothes on their backs.
“We spoke to so many women who said, ‘I left everything behind, I didn’t have very much, but I had a roof over my head and I was able to at least put food on the table for my children,’” Stockton told Catholic San Francisco on May 22. She said the women were “extremely sincere” that they would would not have left everything behind to begin a journey, often on foot, if they did not fear for their lives and those of their children.
The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, collectively known as CARA, recruits and trains attorneys, students, interpreters, social workers and others to help ensure that families detained in Dilley receive competent, pro bono representation and preparation for the asylum process.
“I really believe in the Catholic mission of going out into the community and working and that’s how I ended up at Catholic Charities,” said McArthur, who provides legal services to both documented and undocumented immigrants at Catholic Charities.
McArthur is accredited by the Department of Justice and provides much of the same work a lawyer can at a very low cost to the client because Catholic Charities is registered through the DOJ.
She is not Catholic, but has a strong personal conviction about “welcoming the stranger.” Her desire to go to Dilley, she said, was a “direct response” to U.S. immigration policies and what is happening at the border.
“I felt like maybe I needed to go someplace where people are not represented,” she said.
Stockton, a lifelong Catholic, served as an immigration judge in San Francisco for 21 years, retiring in 2011. After finding common ground with McArthur at Catholic Charities, the pair planned their trip with the blessing of program director Francisco Gonzalez.
In Dilley, Stockton and McArthur were trained along with other volunteers on the intake process for CARA representation. The end goal is to get families out of detention moving toward the asylum process.
If a person comes here seeking refuge and can establish that they have a “credible fear” claim based upon any one of the protected five asylum grounds, said Stockton, the detainee may be physically allowed into the United States and pursue their application for asylum afterward.
“Our main goal was to get as much information as we could from each individual, so that person could communicate their fears and how it fell within the law to the asylum officer,” she said.
“These people, so many of them are so incredibly traumatized,” said McArthur. The women say things like they want a better life for my children. “But we need to know what happened to you that you want a better life here?”
In the U.S., a “better life” is often construed as economic opportunity, but Stockton said the lives of the people she talked to are so simple, a “better life” mostly means freedom from relentless fear.
Nearly three-quarters of the stories they heard involved gang violence, domestic violence, extortion or death threats.
“The typical story at least as far as I was concerned, was extortion or death threats by gangs,” said McArthur. Another story that was quite common, she said, was a person living in between two gang territories or had to travel between two different gang territories for work would be accused of “spying” for each and threatened with death.
“Whether those threats were carried out or not I don’t know, but if someone was saying that to me I would leave too,” she said.
“I did ask them, are you aware of anyone who had a similar threat made who decided not to go along and stayed?” Stockton said. She was told, often “very matter of factly,” that they were killed.
A woman and her sister who lived on a rural road in Mexico with their families told McArthur that members of a gang told them to sell their livestock to come up with money they wanted.
“They obviously didn’t have anything and their animals were their only livelihood,” Stockton said.
When they didn’t produce the money, the gang came in the middle of the night, kicked them off their own land and took the husbands away. The women and children ran into the darkness with their children. The next day they presented themselves at the border.
Stockton admitted that her career had made her a cynic, but the trip to Dilley changed that
“By the time I was ready to retire, I had become very jaded,” she said. “I was sick and tired of immigration fraud.”
How there were claims made that were within the box of what you needed to prove in order to be eligible to receive asylum. “But the question was, did it happen to that person?”
“A lot of it was because the stories were very repetitious, as we saw in just one week in Dilley,” she said.
“The stories are raw, that’s the word I use,” she said. “I believed that that these things happened to these women and that was something very moving in my opinion.
McArthur and Stockton described the privilege of being able to listen to stories that have perhaps never been shared with anyone.
“I don’t think many of these women have ever been listened to,” said Stockton.
McArthur said she wishes that more people would volunteer to do this work.
“It’s not like, oh, you have to be a retired immigration judge to do this,” she said, or a lawyer.
“We have so much here, each one of us, each day has so much to give and so much privilege already that gosh it would just be great if more people understood what actually is happening with these people,” she said.