Adriana Heffley (J.D. ’19), an evening student and immigration paralegal at Elliott Immigration Law, spent the first week of January working with the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project at the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, Texas, where over a thousand women and children, many with valid claims to asylum, are detained.
“Our firm wanted to support refugees, particularly after the anti-immigrant rhetoric we have been hearing of lately,” Heffley stated.
Heffley said the Refugee and Asylum class she took at Georgia State Law also motivated her to volunteer.
"I really enjoyed Professor Shana Tabak's class, for which we submitted an asylum application for a fictional client. After my experience with Professor Tabak, I became interested in working on asylum cases in practice," she said.
At the detention center, Heffley, along with other attorney and law student volunteers, assisted women seeking asylum in preparing for their Credible Fear Interviews. In the interviews with asylum officers, the women must prove they have a “credible fear” of persecution should they be made to return to their home countries.Most of the women Heffley worked with come from Central America’s Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
“These three countries are among the five most violent in the Western Hemisphere. El Salvador in particular is 24 times more dangerous than the United States. These countries are overrun by gangs who have attained so much power through brutality and numbers that the governments are unable to control them,” Heffley said.
Many of the women Heffley met had been victimized first-hand by the gangs. Those who owned businesses were often extorted and forced to pay large sums of money in “renta.” Even an operator of a roadside fruit stand would be a target for the gangs. Reporting extortion to the police is typically not an option. Police, fearing retribution from the gangs, may simply ignore the report. Worse, police informants may tell the gangs about the report, leading the gangs to retaliate by killing the woman’s entire family. Because reporting the gangs to police is so dangerous, it is often considered a political act, Heffley said.
In addition to gang violence, many of the women Heffley met with suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of spouses and family.
“We worked with the women in pairs to understand the chronology of their stories and help them present their cases to the asylum officers as strongly and clearly as possible,” Heffley said. “It was heartbreaking to hear about the trauma these women endured. Central America has a massive problem of ignoring violence against women; police often consider ‘domestic issues’ to be a private matter and will not get involved.”
The CARA project also works to reunite families; Heffley and the other volunteers interviewed women to determine whether they had been separated from their spouses or children. If so, CARA worked to bring them back together.
At the end of the week, Heffley had the opportunity to accompany a political dissident she had spent the week preparing with to the Credible Fear Interview.
“I quickly came to admire the strength of her convictions in the face of persecution and her devotion to her family. It was a privilege to be by her side during the interview with the asylum officer. She did a fantastic job of telling her story,” Heffley said.
At the end of the interview, Heffley made a statement detailing the high risk the woman faced of being persecuted because of her political opinions if she returned to her country.
“Spending the week working with these women and volunteers was life-changing,” Heffley said. “I am incredibly grateful to Erin Elliott for sending me to Dilley on behalf of Elliot Immigration Law. In the future, I am eager to work on behalf of asylum-seekers and to assist in ending the inhumane practice of family detention. America simply cannot turn its back on those being persecuted in other countries.”
“I am so pleased that Adriana took the initiative to harness what she learned in Refugee and Asylum law and apply it to making a significant difference in the lives of the mothers and kids who are detained at the Dilley detention center,” Tabak said. “Considering how debates about refugee law and policy have been dominating the headlines, she has been fortunate to contribute to a population that is in such desperate need of legal aid.”
Heffley strongly encourages Spanish-speaking students and attorneys at Georgia State Law to volunteer with the CARA project.