Protecting and Providing Due Process with Erika Pinheiro

Episode Notes

Transcript

Erika Pinheiro:

It just seems like a full breakdown of the rule of law with respect to immigrants because they have been so dehumanized by this administration. It’s really frightening to me that at least a significant portion of the American public seems to be okay with this. I have been screaming from the rooftop saying, if you let this happen to immigrants, it will happen to you too as a US citizen not understanding as citizens how easy it is for those same concepts to be applied to us.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar border Immigration and refugee policy expert Erika Pinheiro SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I’m thrilled to have our guest today, Erika Pinheiro. With Ella, we know that one of the major issues going on in this country right now in almost every community, not just the border communities, are issues related to immigration and legal residents in this country. We see all types of activities going on that are being challenged both by the courts as well as by the states and the communities. El o and Erika have been fighting these battles for Erika, I think it’s almost a decade. We’re looking forward to hearing about your pathway into this type of work and then the work that your agency is doing. Welcome to SideBar.

Erika Pinheiro:

Thank you so much for having me

Jackie Gardina:

Erika. One of the things that we’re trying to do is highlight attorneys and other community activists who are doing work in the communities to help move things forward in a way that’s positive. One question that we focused on is how did you end up on this path?

Erika Pinheiro:

Well, both of my parents immigrated to the United States. They actually both fled a fascist dictatorship in Portugal, and so our entire family was displaced globally for decades. That always stuck with me growing up just because we had family all over the world. Things obviously improved in Portugal over time and some went back, but the experience of having to flee, especially for the male members of my family forced conscription into the army. That was a story I grew up with. I always wanted to be an attorney. I really liked the idea of being a defense attorney. Initially I thought about criminal defense, but just having language skills. I speak Portuguese and Spanish. I kind of fell into immigration and then never got out of it. I just kept doing it. I started doing immigration law as a paralegal when I was right out of undergrad, so I was 21, 22 years old and never stopped doing it since then.

Jackie Gardina:

And how did you end up at together rising or alter Lado?

Erika Pinheiro:

When I first came out of law school, I was working with detained adults and children in Southern California. A friend of mine had started Aldo as an all volunteer organization. We would go to Tijuana a couple times a year, and it was just really interesting because working in the detained setting, the idea of deportation is kind of abstract, but then going across the border and seeing the impact on individuals as well as seeing asylum seekers before they’re going into the detention system was just really impactful. I started on the board of alo Todo in 2015 and went down to Tijuana a couple times, and then of course Trump was elected the first time, even before he was inaugurated. Customs and Border Protection started turning asylum seekers away at ports of entry, and so the founder of the organization and myself and another attorney who was living in Tijuana, we decided that even though it was an all volunteer organization, we were going to quit our other jobs and prepare a lawsuit against the government to reopen asylum processing. That’s how we started off. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, but we’ve grown now to around 70 employees in two different countries.

Mitch Winick:

Erika, we tend to focus on the process of immigration and the process of being able to cross borders, but I think we frequently get lost in the process and forget to talk about the stories and the human impact this is having and the emotional impact of not only those who are trying to achieve lawful immigration, but those of you working to help them. Tell us a little more about the work you’re doing and the sense of what it’s like and how challenging is it?

Erika Pinheiro:

It’s extremely challenging when we’re working directly with clients. I always say every single day you’re going to hear the worst thing you’ve ever heard, and that is definitely true. And working with asylum seekers in particular, I would say being on the front lines during family separation in particular was really traumatizing, and I had my first child at that time just at the height of family separation, so I couldn’t imagine someone taking him from me and then having the parents as clients and the responsibility of getting their children back to them was just, it was heavy. It was really heavy and it was a big responsibility and thankfully we were able to reunify a lot of families, but it stays with you, right? And I talked to my coworkers who’ve been working on the border with me for many years and we all agree that it’s changed us as people just having seen the things we see and going through all of that with our clients.

We’ve had a lot of clients die because they couldn’t reach safety or because they were deported to danger. It’s been tough, but I will say now that the organization has grown a lot, there’s also that less glamorous part that no one thinks about of running a nonprofit that can be very stressful in different ways, but the thing that’s now looming on the horizon is the Trump administration’s focus on dismantling immigration, nonprofits. I mean, they’ve already started by cutting our federal funding going after us. That’s something that we’ve gone through before we see coming again, and it’s definitely a different kind of stress, but stressful nonetheless.

Jackie Gardina:

There’s so many threads I want to pull on out of what you just said, but I’m going to pick one right now and maybe we can circle back to some of the others. The phrase family separation is easy to understand, but still for a lot of people it’s abstract and you’re living it day in and day out, but I think what’s really powerful specifically in your 2019 Ted talk is you talking about your experience with being separated with the federal government, interfering with your ability to return home to your newborn son. And I’m wondering if you could share that you’re an American citizen living in Tijuana, Mexico, but crossing the border every day to come to work. You have a newborn son about, I think he was 10 months old at the time, right?

Erika Pinheiro:

Yes.

Jackie Gardina:

And you try to go back home one night and could you just fill people in on what happened?

Erika Pinheiro:

Yeah. I was living in Tijuana at the time. My son is born in Mexico. I had a business visa because we were setting up the organization in Mexico. The type of visa you need for travel to southern Mexico is different than that you need for the border, so I actually renewed my visa on that day and in order to activate the visa, I had to leave and return back into Mexico at a port of entry, and so I got the visa, they stamped my passport, everything was fine. I paid the fee and then they swiped my passport when I went back through the port of entry and an alert came up on my passport, and so they pulled me into a little room and they told me that an alert had come up on my passport saying that I was a national security risk. The Mexican officials asked me if I had a warrant out for my arrest.

Of course I didn’t. They were like, oh, okay, it’s probably a mistake. Let’s call Mexico City and we’ll work it out. Time passed, they said it would be 10 minutes. It was more, and then after I was sitting in this room with other people who’d been denied entry to Mexico, eventually another officer came in and started asking me a lot of questions like if I had military training, if I had weapons training, it was like I had to fill out this 40 page questionnaire, those types of questions. I had notified my lawyer at that point, but I still thought, this is a mistake. They’re going to just let me through, and I knew it was serious. When I asked to go to the restroom and they had a soldier follow me into the bathroom, I couldn’t leave. I was detained. I think I was there for three or four hours.

They did let my attorney come see me. She said, they’re not going to let you into Mexico. You have this alert. They’re going to return you to the United States. My son was in Mexico and I told them, I need to get to my son, and they were like, you cannot enter Mexico at this port of entry. I was very upset obviously, and turned over to CBP. They didn’t say anything to me. They just sat me down, think I was out of CBP custody within 20 minutes or something like that. I had no choice but to just reenter Mexico. I went around the immigration checkpoint to get my son.

Jackie Gardina:

It’s such a powerful story because here you are trying to defend parents who are facing separation from their children, and because of that work, the federal government placed seemingly a warning on your passport that prevented you from having access to your child. You were experiencing what your clients were experiencing, not for hours, but for days, months and years.

Erika Pinheiro:

I was able to obtain residency through the Mexican consulate in San Diego. I was able to reenter Mexico after about a month and a half. It is a microcosm of what my clients experience, but I think I have a lot more privilege as a US citizen, as an attorney, and I will say the Mexican government was very supportive of me. They weren’t the ones who placed the alert, but they were willing to waive it so that I could reunify with my son in Mexico. I’m really, really grateful to the consular officials who helped me because there’s people who are deported and separated for life from their children, and when I reentered on that visa, I was detained again, I was interrogated again and I was told that every single time I had any contact with an immigration official while I had that alert on my passport that they would still allow me to enter Mexico, but that I would be stopped and I would be interrogated and have to go through that again, and so I was scared to travel outside of Mexico during that time until I knew the alert had been lifted because I thought, what if I go visit my family in Portugal?

I could be detained and just deported back to the United States because I have this national security risk alert on my passport. It was very surreal, honestly, and now we’re seeing a real expansion of that kind of behavior from the second Trump administration.

Mitch Winick:

Erika, let me talk about that expansion for just a moment. I, for 1:00 AM confused. I’ve been a lawyer for almost 40 years, actually more than 40 years, and I’m confused. We had a rule in the United States. It flowed from the constitution that if someone’s physical presence was within the boundaries of the United States, that they were entitled to at least minimal due process. It may not be the due process that a citizen would, but it appears to me that the argument is now being made that that does not exist, that we owe no due process, and then we’ve seen the current administration act on that by just sweeping people up and shipping them out of the country without anything. No access to family, no access to lawyers, no access to officials. They’re just grabbed and sent. How would you explain the current status of where we are?

Erika Pinheiro:

I think it’s really frightening since I went through the experience I just described. I have been screaming from the rooftop saying, if you let this happen to immigrants, it will happen to you too as a US citizen. The dozens of cases we’re seeing in detention of people who are deported, even if they have removal proceedings pending or application for immigration status pending, it just seems like a full breakdown of the rule of law with respect to immigrants because they have been so dehumanized by this administration and it’s really frightening to me that at least a significant portion of the American public seems to be okay with this, especially when they’re throwing around allegations of gang membership of terrorism based on zero evidence, not understanding as citizens how easy it is for those same concepts to be applied to us. For me, it’s extremely frightening. It’s clearly not only being used to expel immigrants but also to attack political opponents, and we’ve seen numerous examples of that in the recent past against not only immigrant activists but citizen activists as well.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school, and schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information go to monterey law.edu.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to follow up with another thread that came out of the earlier conversation and is related to what Mitch is talking about, about the rule of law, which is attacks on the legal profession and lawyers, and we’ve seen those attacks aimed specifically at those who are providing advice to migrants who are worried or fearful about what might happen to them here in the United States. I’ve seen Cheryl Eiffel talk about it through the lens of the same kind of attacks were done against the NAACP during the Civil rights movement to intimidate the lawyers that were bringing the lawsuits that were challenging the underlying discriminatory government behavior. You are in the midst of that right now. Are you and your colleagues feeling that intimidation in the work that you do?

Erika Pinheiro:

It’s not stopping us from doing the work, that’s for sure. I mean, we’re defiant, I think is a good word, and we also went through this in the first Trump administration, and I think it’s fairly unique amongst immigration service providers to have already experienced this. We expected this to happen and we made our preparations as best as we could in the first Trump administration. The government was accusing us of coaching asylum seekers. They actually interrogated our clients when they were processed at ports of entry to see if we had told them what we had told them to say, what information we had given them. We provide know your rights materials to asylum seekers. Those were seized by the government and obviously we’re not coaching people. These are people with legitimate claims and ethically we would never do something like that, and so they came up empty when looking to prosecute us on that basis the first time around.

That aspect of intimidation, that intimidation tactic of saying like, oh, you’re coaching asylum seekers. You’re telling them to lie. I mean, it’s just blatantly untrue. There’s not going to be any evidence of that, but again, going back to the fact that the Trump administration clearly doesn’t feel that they need evidence to move against individuals is really worrisome to me. There’s been a few stories that have come out recently. There was an attorney who gave know your rights information to some undocumented immigrants who was then visited by HSI agents at his home. There’s an individual who had his house rated because he was posting photos of ICE agents who were working in his neighborhood for community awareness, which is legal to do. He wasn’t giving their home addresses, just showing who they are. So there’s definitely an escalation here, especially pro-Palestine activists also being targeted in the same way. The characterization of the work that we’re doing has been twisted saying, we’re coaching people or we’re smuggling people by bringing them to a port of entry, which is ludicrous. It’s our legal right to present themselves, so that twisting and the lack of evidence needed to really conduct a raid or interrogate someone or detain them, that is really worrisome, but it’s not going to stop us from continuing the work

Mitch Winick:

To talk about the recent episode of a judge being arrested is totally off the rails. As far as anything that we would consider a reasonable balance of the rule of law or a reasonable application of the rule of law to have a federal agency arrest a state judge because they don’t like the way that state judge handled their Courtroom and someone appearing before them. It seems like that is, first of all, as outrageous as that is, and hopefully the higher courts will step in and say, that is unacceptable and shall not happen. It does raise the question of this circular reasoning that individuals, if they don’t show up for mandatory meetings or sessions with the immigration officials, they’re subject to being arrested or detained. If they now do show up, they’re using those meetings as a location to seize people. That’s just an impossible situation. How do you advise people in that kind of an environment?

Erika Pinheiro:

I will say by and large, and probably contrary to popular belief, our clients are extremely interested in following the rules, whether or not they entered at a port of entry or cross between ports of entry to seek protection. They want to show up, they want to go to their appointments, they want to do things the right way. It’s not just because of whether or not they’ll get in trouble. It’s a respect for the law. Really. They want to be American. They want to follow the rules here, and so people are aware that individuals are being detained at ice check-ins that they’re being detained at immigration court, but I have not had a client yet who says, well, maybe I won’t show up. They still do it and comply with their obligations. That might change over time, and I’m sure for some individuals that’s not true depending on their personal circumstances. I can imagine someone who’s the sole caretaker of a child with cancer or other serious illness might not want to show up to their ice check-in if they feel they could be separated from that child or have the child deported with them. This has happened in several recent cases, but by and large, our clients really just want to comply with the law, and so they are still showing up.

Jackie Gardina:

Like so many of the guests on this show, I went to law school because I wanted the tools to create change. If you have that same passion and you want to develop the necessary skills and knowledge in a nurturing environment built for working adults, join us at Colleges of Law with both in-person and online learning options. Take the first step to building a better future for you and your [email protected].

Mitch Winick:

Your good work and the work that your organization is doing is just exceptional, extraordinary, and incredibly important right now.

Erika Pinheiro:

Thank you.

Mitch Winick:

In Monterey County where I live, we have a very high percentage of agricultural workers, seasonal workers, and there’s a huge concern about their safety even when they’re here on appropriate work visas. The fear is we see it as children being held out of school, people being afraid to go for necessary medical care, and so our community put together a group of, I think it’s now 20 or 30 organizations, lawyers and nonprofits, the unions, the employers, everybody banding together to try to provide if nothing else, accurate and timely information about what’s going on. Because what we were seeing is that it was the fear of what might happen that was really disrupting people’s lives and putting them at risk. Not any evidence of it actually happening that seemed to create a comfort zone to the extent there could be one within our county, and I just wanted to shout out that it is possible within a community that when the community itself decides this is the way we want to protect the people who live here, work here, providing the food for us, that there can be a benefit to it.

Erika Pinheiro:

Definitely. And we’ve been involved in creating some rapid response networks in California, similar to what you described where there haven’t been any, so particular, we’re working in the Imperial Valley, it’s on the California border east of San Diego, and I think exactly what you described, it’s a large agricultural worker population. There’s just a ton of fear and we don’t want people to stop engaging in community activities like school or essential activities like healthcare because of this fear. Now, I will say that telling people their rights in an era where rights are just being trampled, it’s not going to a hundred percent solve the problem. Right, and this is something we saw in the first Trump administration too, just telling ice, you need a warrant to enter, sometimes won’t stop them from coming in, and that’s part of the know your rights education, but I think having US citizens standing in solidarity with the community is probably the most important thing, and I’ve seen cases of neighbors joining arms to stop ice from entering a residence, people going to the site of a raid to record and make sure that people are getting access to council.

Those kinds of things are just super important because we cannot rely on the Department of Homeland Security to follow the law in these enforcement operations, and so we have to bear witness and physically be there to provide support.

Mitch Winick:

And if I could just add the extent to where this is gone is just shocking. It’s just shocking. We had a call out for this weekend where there was a very popular concert that was about to happen in one of the small communities outside of Monterey, a very popular band focused on the Latinx community, and there was the sense that there was a need to have lawyers and other community activists attend the concert just to be there so that the concert wouldn’t become a hotspot, seizing or taking folks away, pulling them aside for inquiries for investigations, and it was just such a sad commentary to me that we’ve reached that point. On the other hand, from the optimism side, if you can squeeze optimism out of that, there was a response from the community who said, we’ll be there. We will be there. We’ll be there to observe, we’ll be there to speak up, we’ll be there to link arms, we’ll be there to help so that families can enjoy what is otherwise just a fun family outing to go to a music concert and festival.

Jackie Gardina:

It’s hard to be optimistic with this first a hundred days under our belt, and it’s hard for me not to want to come in and say, here’s 10 examples of where things are going badly. And I know there’s examples. For example, the Vermont District Court just released

Erika Pinheiro:

The Columbia University activist. Yes,

Jackie Gardina:

We see evidence of that where the courts are standing up. But I’m wondering if through your lens, when you think about a story that brings you hope, that keeps you optimistic in the work that you’re doing, what is that story? What could you give to us to hang on to?

Erika Pinheiro:

I guess two things come to mind. We’ve been deeply involved in the work of reunifying families since the first Trump administration, and there are still hundreds of families separated from back then. There’s still hundreds of families that have not been reunified, but we are continuing to reunify families. We just got another family approved this past week, which is great. It is a slow process and the Trump administration is trying to dismantle it to the extent that they can within the confines of the missile settlement agreement. So that has been challenging. We’ve definitely faced challenges in continuing our reunification efforts, but when we’re able to bring together parents and children who haven’t seen each other in five or six years, it is positive. It’s definitely the beginning of a long period of healing. Being able to bear witness to those moments and being able to help make them happen, I think is something positive.

And then another positive thing, at least on the Mexico side is that we often think of deportation as the end. It is very traumatic and it’s especially traumatic when people are separated from family members that they have in the United States, but we have amongst our own staff, numerous examples of post deportation success stories, people who have done incredibly well for themselves after deportation, and we continue to see that resilience from people who come to Mexico decide to have their families join them here, and it’s an opportunity, a new life, and all of the skills that they gained in the United States actually are very beneficial to them here. So we do see people after time be like, I don’t want to go back. I have a great life here. My family loves it here, and my kids are getting a great education. So sometimes it is a life and death issue, but sometimes it can be the beginning of something good. I’ll add a third thing. Even the asylum seekers that I think are in the most danger, having the bravery to still speak up and go public with their stories and engage in the press conferences and get interviewed by the media, that’s makes me feel like, well, if they’re not scared, I can’t be scared either because they’re the ones who have the most to lose and they still believe in justice and due process and the right to live freely, and so we have to do everything we can to support that.

Mitch Winick:

Erika, I’d like to end with really a call to action. We can’t leave all of these efforts to organizations like all of us have to step up and decide how we can help. What is your call to action to those who might want to volunteer and help? You don’t have to be an immigration lawyer to be a lawyer who could help and be trained to help in this. You don’t have to be a lawyer to help on many of these things. What would you say to those who are listening and say, I want to help? How can I do that?

Erika Pinheiro:

If anyone is in Southern California or is interested in remote volunteer work, they can go to our website, alo lalo.org, and then there’s a volunteer page where you can sign up and we match people with different opportunities depending on their abilities, and I would say the majority of our volunteers are not attorneys, and so it can be anything from helping accompany someone to an appointment or maybe getting trained to do some immigration legal work if you’re an attorney in another field translation work. I mean, it really varies and the needs are always shifting, so I would encourage folks who want to get involved that way to check it out. But I think going back to our conversation earlier, there’s numerous ways for people to get involved in their own communities. I would encourage folks to see if there is a rapid response coalition in your area and become involved there so that you can, like you mentioned, make sure that immigrant families have the ability to enjoy a family night out because you’re there standing in solidarity with them.

And then another really important thing is to call your representatives. Let them know that you don’t want your tax dollars spent on extraordinary renditions to El Salvador or on sending individuals to countries that they maybe have never set foot in before, or torturing people in for-profit detention centers. You are a voter. Your representatives want to hear from you. I do recommend calling instead of emailing because they have to record all those calls, but that helps, and especially if you have representatives involved in oversight or appropriations, for sure, those calls definitely make a difference. My number one piece of advice is to get involved in your own community because the immigrant families there are your neighbors and they deserve your support and solidarity.

Jackie Gardina:

Erika, thank you so much for taking time out. What I know is an incredibly busy work and life schedule right now. We appreciate you spending some time with us today and really educating all of us about the work that you do.

Erika Pinheiro:

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Mitch Winick:

Erika, thank you. Thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for joining us today on SideBar.

Erika Pinheiro:

Thank you,

Mitch Winick:

Jackie. This was a great episode. I was delighted, as I said at the beginning, to have Erika on to help us understand some of the issues that are going on here in our country. I have to say, I had to try to be careful because personally, I am just outraged at the idea that within our country, we have circumstances within the last few weeks where citizen children are swept up by the government, put on a plane and shipped out of the country without even the opportunity to talk to a lawyer, an administrative agency. It’s irrational. It is so against the rule of law. It bypasses everything I’ve ever understood that the Constitution provides for us in this country. And as Erika said, if we can do it to those children, we can do it to anybody.

Jackie Gardina:

And I think that’s the part that is so challenging. I know this season was supposed to be optimism in action, and I think certainly Erika and all of our colleagues that work at Together Rising are engaged in optimism in action because they are definitely pushing a boulder up a hill. Right now. I really want to tie together that idea of how we treat others, how we treat the rule of law and the attacks on the legal profession. I really want people to understand that the government’s, the explicit attacks on lawyers and the legal profession is all part of undermining that rule of law idea.

Mitch Winick:

If you believe in this, if you support this, if you want to see democracy restored the Constitution and the rule of law in place, there is a role for all of us lawyers, non-lawyers alike to step up in our community, step up through organizations as volunteers, and to help make this happen.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to a legal education to marginalized

Mitch Winick:

Communities. For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.

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