At This Point, Traffic Court Would Be An Upgrade

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:00 Shaina: Before this administration, we coordinated eight federally funded legal aid programs, and now there are three that still remain.

0:00:17 Shaina: We saw legal partners throughout the country drop everything, drop their vacation plans, and leave their families and drive out to shelters to counsel children who were being hauled onto planes in the middle of the night.

0:00:36 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1240. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. And in a moment, I'll be joined by real-life immigration attorney, Matt Cameron. And we'll be joining by a guest for an interview today. This is someone who I think in the Mr. Rogers sense is one of the helpers, one of the people running toward the fire of fascism, the fascism fire, you know, the big one, giant one we have going. It's bigger every single day. Shana Abare of the Acacia Center for Justice joins us today. The Acacia Center is amazing. Not only do they help immigrants who obviously are some of the most primary targets of the fascist administration, also Acacia Centre helps people who help people. They've got amazing resources, not only for other immigration attorneys and people who work in that field, but also for people who might not be attorneys at all. There's ways that you and I can help. So we're speaking with Shana to talk about that and to talk About what life has been been like for people doing this really stressful and traumatic work right now. It's not easy and it's good to hear from the people who are really doing incredible work and thankless work in order to help the people Who Need It Most. All right, we'll take our first break, which you can avoid at patreon .com slash law. You can avoid the ads, you can support the show and get lot awful movies and other goodies sometimes. All Right, we're going to take a break and then we'll be on with shana

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0:01:55 Matt: All right, well, we're very excited to welcome to Opening Arguments, Shana Ibera, the founder and executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice. How was your Friday, Shanna?

0:02:01 Shaina: Going all right, every day is another day.

0:02:04 Matt: Yeah. This is quite a time to be running an immigration nonprofit. We actually have not had the nonprofit world very well represented on the show. I want to be sure to talk to somebody who's out in the trenches doing what you're doing.

0:02:13 Thomas: It's a bad sign if your mantra for the day is just restating like what the day is well um days and hours are units of time guys the worse it gets the more like basic sick you have to reset to earth

0:02:22 Shaina: Day.

0:02:24 Matt: I hear that. Man, I hear then. I'm with you.

0:02:31 Shaina: Right. Every day is a day.

0:02:32 Thomas: Is a spinning rock around the

0:02:37 Matt: I'm told today is Friday. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You've been in the nonprofit justice arena, I guess, for a very long time. I just wanted to talk just before we get into anything else, I want to ask you a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are now. I know you're coming from the Vera Institute and you've had a long career in policy and thinking about justice in action.

0:02:37 Thomas: Sun yeah exactly yeah

0:02:58 Matt: So I just kind of want to know how you Got here and what you've been doing.

0:03:00 Shaina: I am now 20 years after having graduated from law school now that we're in 2026, which sounds really long to me.

0:03:11 Matt: I know. I Know the Feeling. Same for me. Okay.

0:03:11 Thomas: Got

0:03:13 Shaina: I'm one of those rare people that I I think, knew more or less what I wanted to do from a pretty young age. I was nine when I first wanted to, you know, that's when I, yeah, that'S when I took the bar exam. I WAS NINE WHEN I REALLY SETTLED ON THE IDEA THAT I WANTED TO DO CIVIL RIGHTS LAW. AND THAT CAME FROM MY FAMILY HISTORY AND WHAT I SAW AS LIKE MY IDENTITY AND MY LEGACY. MY PARENTS WERE BOTH CIVile rights workers, very involved in voting rights efforts in the South in the 1970s and 60s and desegregation. My dad's family has been really involved in various justice movements for several generations. My mom grew up in the Deep South in Louisiana and had her formation as a social worker. The confluence of who I am and of being a multiracial, multigenerational American really drew me to a belief that while we're here on earth, our job is to make systems and to make justice less broken. Growing up in an interracial family, in a really vibrant multiracial community, that kind of drive to build a more inclusive and just future was embedded in my identity from a very young age.

0:03:23 Thomas: Your your first client no wow yeah

0:03:45 Matt: Did you have a lot of lawyers in the family?

0:04:36 Shaina: No, actually, it was so funny. I think my dad would have been an excellent lawyer, but he was a biologist. I think one of his cousins was a lawyer, but not a civil rights attorney. I loved history. I love thinking about the way that social movements and social policy develop. I grew up right near Washington, DC in Maryland. It just drew me to law as a field where policy and access to justice could really be shaped as a kid just seeing so much that I thought, why is this this way? The law is what we agree upon. Our norms can change over time. Certain groups that are completely excluded from a seat at the table can fight for a seat of the table and ensure that their voices are heard. I was really drawn into immigration law in part because my own work and travels in Latin America, seeing the fallout of of a lot of expansionist and interventionist by the U .S. over time, working in the humanitarian arena in Latin America and seeing the impact of forced displacement on communities from the Andes all the way up to Mexico.

0:05:48 Matt: And then of course, the victims of empire that we work with here that didn't make it to the US. And you've been in policy and advocacy pretty much your entire legal career, is that right?

0:05:56 Shaina: Yeah, so I did a bit of a mid -career pivot from being more focused on the policy aspects and legislative work and bringing back the stories of people who were impacted by U .S. policy that caused forced displacement to pivoting more towards legal services, capacity building, and program management. And I really began doing that work in around 2016. And that's when I joined Vera.

0:06:26 Matt: So yeah, tell us about the Vera Center, actually, the Vera Institute.

0:06:28 Shaina: Vera is a national nonprofit based in New York City. It's been around for, I think, 60 years now. Part of the methodology of Vera is really to to stand up projects, test them and evaluate them and see whether they're actually providing more equitable access to justice. And then when they mature to a certain level, Vera helps to spin off those projects into standalone organizations. I think they've done that for about 38 different organizational projects so far. And you're one of the latest ones to spin off. We spun off in 2021, the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022. And it was quite a process. It's not something to be done lightly. Certainly it's a lot of administrative work. And I had been working in these programs for some time at FIRA's Legacy Center on Immigration and Justice. A whole crew of us left for the spinoff and really built the systems that could sustain the infrastructure of coordinated legal representation and legal access programs, we partner with over 100 organizations around the country in managing.

0:07:44 Matt: Yeah, that's the main reason I really wanted to talk to you is the top-down view that you have and the national view. Obviously, I practice in New England and I've got the sort of local view here and I talk to my colleagues around the country. And I guess just to be very clear for listeners so everybody understands, I've mentioned this many times, but of course, there's no constitutional right to counsel an immigration court, which means that in deportation proceedings that no one gets a lawyer automatically as much as possible.

0:08:01 Thomas: More people need to know

0:08:08 Matt: People just keep telling me that the government's paying for me to represent people, and I don't know what to tell them. I wish. But you are coordinating a massive number of... How many lawyers total are sort of under this umbrella?

0:08:11 Thomas: That wow

0:08:20 Shaina: I would say around 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 now.

0:08:25 Matt: Wow. You can do a lot with 2 ,000 immigration lawyers. And what is funding this?

0:08:29 Shaina: Many of our programs are the result of legislation and court settlements. The remaining programs are. Before this administration, we coordinated eight federally funded legal aid programs, and now there are three that still remain. Really, in the first weeks of this administration we experienced the attempt to shutter all of our programs, and our partners in the field had varying levels of success in challenging the shuttering of those programs. We've continued through the volatility to manage and to be willing to continue to manage these programs, but the uncertainty and the volatility has really impacted the number of people who are getting access to justice. Remaining programs really are for unaccompanied children who have come to the U .S., arrived at the border under the age of 18 without a parent or legal guardian, for adults who have been adjudicated incompetent to represent themselves in court because of a cognitive disability or a severe mental health issue or condition. And then for Ms. L settlement families.

0:09:50 Shaina: So those are families who were intentionally separated through the zero tolerance policy of the first Trump administration.

0:09:56 Matt: And there are still a few dozen of those, is that right?

0:09:59 Shaina: Yeah.

0:09:59 Matt: Still out there? Wow.

0:10:00 Shaina: Still families that are receiving those services, it has become harder and harder. People are in a state of constant hypervigilance and trauma right now. The support that communities need has become all the the more acute and the support that legal services partners need is also enormous. They're being asked to do more and more with less and getting a lot of scrutiny for just doing their jobs. I actually also should say that we also have private dollars that has come through in a big way, especially in the last year, philanthropic funders stepping up and realizing that this kind of coordinated legal services, legal representation approach is really important. And so we've come together with other providers around the country, about 90 different providers all came together to set up a rapid response alliance around the country that has been supported by philanthropy and by private giving.

0:10:59 Matt: Oh, good. That's good to hear. Actually, I'm surprised that those three programs even survived. Were these DOGE cuts or was this just inevitable?

0:11:05 Shaina: Yeah, DOGE. DOGE, I think, was one of the factors. As soon as the Trump administration landed, I Think it was day two that we received our first stop work order. So that was even before Doge What has become apparent is that the remaining programs survived because they are buttressed by statute and by consent decrees. While the government certainly wanted to shutter those programs, they were unsuccessful in doing so.

0:11:34 Thomas: So if trump's government had their way there'd just be a line of kids supporting themselves in court being their own lawyer

0:11:41 Shaina: Yeah, and I should mention only like 50 % of kids do end up with representation on accompanied kids, even now. But yeah, it would be a simply lying justice, I guess, where kids would be going before a judge without representation. Although that would be really hard for the judges, too. There's no way for a child to actually get voluntary departure granted by a judge while they're in custody under the regulatory framework that DOJ operates in without being represented by an attorney. I guess they don't care as much about that anymore, but they would be violating their own regulatory framework.

0:12:13 Thomas: Maga

0:12:18 Matt: And I understand too that you offer other support services, not just counsel, but that you work with educating guardians and families, supporting families in removal proceedings.

0:12:26 Shaina: Yeah, we have both legal access programs and legal representation programs. So the legal access programs being more about providing brief advice and counsel and legal orientation, education, and those programs were also shuttered. There was also a robust immigration court help desk that was shuttered their programs around the country that have really kind of sprung up in a organic way that we're partnering with that do court observation and are trying to fill that gap and kind of preserving the the record and helping people who are pro se to understand what to expect in immigration court while, you know, we're seeing the real politicization of immigration court and the lack of neutrality of immigration adjudication.

0:12:46 Matt: Ultimately, even if you don't care about children, as I know arguably many of these people don't, giving attorneys to people with mental disabilities and to children and providing help desk services so people can get their way around the basics of immigration court and educating people, this all saves the government money in the end. Wouldn't you agree?

0:13:29 Shaina: We've made that point for a long time. And actually, there's robust studies that have confirmed that not only does counsel in court help to make the court system more efficient, but it also ensures that people show up at their hearings. 96 % of people who are represented show up at their hearings without having to be detained, whereas people who aren't represented are less likely to show up.

0:13:58 Matt: Yeah. Which makes sense.

0:13:59 Shaina: And that's partly due to some bad paperwork management on the part of the court or individuals not knowing that they need to file a change of address, change of venue.

0:14:11 Thomas: Tries to say that's people just you know running around uh fleeing and then voting I'm guessing is what they say but really it sounds like they might just not know that they have a hearing or something you know like I can totally understand that

0:14:17 Matt: Without a lawyer, it's a very scary prospect to go.

0:14:26 Thomas: It's a very scary prospect with a lawyer matt oh

0:14:29 Shaina: And it's only become more scary now that people know that they could be detained while going to court, while trying to comply with a notice to appear. We are seeing appearance rates plummet, but that's something of the government's own making.

0:14:45 Thomas: Right but then I imagine they get to use that for their propaganda it seems pretty uh pretty dastardly yeah geez

0:14:49 Shaina: And they get to use it to get warrants, right? To get bench warrants.

0:14:54 Matt: Yeah. One of the other benefits of having a lawyer is at least in this jurisdiction, it has no trouble to appear by video. And I think a lot of people don't know that either. That's just something people need to know. But I really was impressed and I was looking into Acacia, sort of the range of services, even now with your funding cuts that you're able to provide. Let me hear more about some of those other programs.

0:15:10 Shaina: We have launched several programs that are responsive to this moment. We have our Habeas Bridge project, which is really working at a local level in Southern California to build partnerships between immigration attorneys and federal bar attorneys so that there can be more capacity to get into federal court, which is, of course, the only way that people are getting their liberty interests represented at this juncture, with bond being almost a dead end.

0:15:45 Thomas: Can you explain that for us non -lawyers a little a little more

0:15:48 Shaina: Sure. Immigration judges have been instructed not to issue bonds to allow people to get out of custody. Before this administration, it was seen as a flight risk. It was pretty much routine to issue a bond or release people on their their own recognizance in order to get out of detention. Now people are not getting out on bond and even if they have been arbitrarily detained and there was no reason whatsoever to think that someone was a flight risk, for instance, they're showing up at their hearings, those people are not able to get OUT without filing a habeas in federal court, which is of course putting a lot of pressure and increasing the workload of the federal judiciary at the same time that the the immigration judiciary is acting as not under their mandate at all to check the prosecutorial power of the government.

0:16:42 Matt: Not to mention our workload, of course, as attorneys, doubling what we have to do just to get people out. We covered this over the course of the year, but this was just the executive branch deciding to completely reinterpret the meaning of immigration law 30 years later and deciding that people just shouldn't get out. And fortunately, we are seeing a lot of big wins across the federal judiciary, including the BI decision. Yohari Hurtado was, I think, finally just reversed by federal court, but it's been long and painful in the habeas bridge. And we have a program like that as well here in New England. And it's just such a vital thing to be able to connect. A lot of immigration attorneys are not barred in federal court. Like you said, just being able to contact people, making sure they get immediate access to habeas, making sure we can file these as quickly as possible before they move out of the jurisdiction. This is vital stuff, life -saving stuff.

0:17:22 Shaina: Especially because the administration is transferring people as quickly as possible away from their community support network, away from the lawyers.

0:17:30 Matt: We're seeing it pretty quick. And you said this is something that was set up within the past year?

0:17:34 Shaina: Yeah within the past year.

0:17:36 Matt: Great.

0:17:36 Shaina: And then we also have our witness for justice program, which is really a program that's designed to uplift the voices and perspectives of people People who are engaging in court observation all around the country, which has also gotten harder and harder, despite these being public tribunals under law and under regs, should be First Amendment zones where people can go in and observe and document what they're seeing in court. Both legal access and public access has been constrained under this administration with court closures.

0:18:10 Shaina: However, people are continuing to do this work and continuing to insist on access. And our work with the Witness for Justice program is really to educate people on what court observation is, educate them on the importance of independence of immigration adjudications, and also to track legal access. And public access to the immigration tribunals is being denied.

0:18:33 Matt: I wanted to ask you because this is such an important program. I know there have to be people listening who might want to do some court observation, maybe hadn't thought about it before. There are immigration courts all around the country in every major city. And so what does that look like? What is being a court observer like right now? What should they expect?

0:18:49 Shaina: Well, we've been working with different cohorts of volunteers. What they should expect is they can either participate virtually in some cases, depending on the court, or in person. You have to line up to go into the court. You cannot film within the court We have forms that people can fill out recording their observations. We really do make a distinction between court accompaniment and court observation. Court accompaniment is definitely a vital tool to help people to feel some sense of comfort that if they're disappeared from their court hearing, there will be someone who's calling their family and helping them to understand what happened to their loved one. But court observation is really a less participatory technique that is something that can be used to both preserve the record if the courts are airing and also can beused in order to build more civic engagement and to preserve the public accessibility to the immigration courts at a time when immigration court has become more and more dangerous

0:19:55 Matt: Really

0:19:55 Shaina: For people who are really just trying to do things the way that they have been told. Is necessary in order for them to legally comply.

0:20:03 Matt: Believe there's a difference when members of the public who don't have a connection to the case are just sitting in on a case. This is maybe just me, maybe it's just anecdotal, but I do think that the judges take that seriously. And the ones at least that that welcome members of the public, and they all should. As you said, they're open proceedings. Obviously, if there's an asylum hearing or something sensitive going on, we expect that you're not going to have the public sitting in. But for the most part, it's a really good thing for people to be able to do and to bear witness and just see what's going on. Especially to watch the detained docket. I think that's just so important right now for people in custody. So the immigration courts have both detained and non -detained dockets.

0:20:30 Thomas: So what's that okay oh gotcha

0:20:36 Matt: You've got dedicated judges that are just reviewing the people in custodiancy.

0:20:38 Thomas: So how do people do that how do you how do You watch that how you do

0:20:42 Shaina: The court dockets are supposed to be posted. They have been kind of intermittently not posting the dockets, but the DOJ website does have that information about both the WebEx hearings and information about where the courts are. We encourage participants to call the day ahead of time and confirm when the docket's are. There are a lot of groups that are coordinating this on the ground. If people are interested, we have a link to Witness for Justice on our website, and they can get the training and kind of understand the mechanics.

0:21:17 Thomas: Oh yeah for sure we'll put that in the show

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0:21:25 Matt: You're the founder of the Acacia Center. You started in 2021, is that right? Okay, great.

0:21:27 Shaina: I'm the inaugural director, executive director. It's a spinoff. So I would say the founding really happened as part of like a collaborative effort between the Vera Institute of Justice and the legal services field that saw this necessary continuity of the work that Bureau had been doing for about two decades.

0:21:43 Matt: What is your day like? So what are you doing all day coordinating these massive programs?

0:21:53 Shaina: It's a lot of meetings, checking in with people throughout our organization, checking in with our partners, tracking the trends that we're hearing and seeing on the ground, thinking through the needs. We do like regular needs assessments for understanding what capacity needs practitioners have and really trying to meet the needs of the moment, creating training trainings, including trainings on trauma-informed legal practice, that's become more and more important. Over the last decade, really, I feel like our field has been sprinting for over a decade with very little ability to actually decompress and debrief and to do that kind of health care that is

0:21:54 Thomas: Notes that's

0:22:42 Shaina: So important, community care that ist so important for sustainability. Ability.

0:22:46 Thomas: What I was gonna ask about is is like how this has changed like how's your job and I'm sure the mental health challenges and everything, the overall morale of all of you folks doing this work. How have you dealt with that? How has that changed in the last, it's now 10 years of Trump. Not that Trump was the start of everything wrong with immigration or anything by any means, but I'm, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it, it, it didn't help.

0:23:08 Shaina: It's really been a challenge. And I think nobody's in this work to get rich or in this world because they believe in due process. They believe that everyone should have someone who is qualified and adept at navigating a very complex system by their side when they're going through a process that could end up exiling them or detaining them. We've moved from people People feeling they're onboarding a lot of vicarious trauma to some professionals in our field, really feeling the effects of primary trauma on a day -to -day basis. And I think that's particularly true for lawyers and legal staff who themselves are the children of immigrants or who are racially profiled as perhaps being immigrant because of the color of their skin. And I think that people are grappling with a lot of moral injury and feelings of institutional betrayal.

0:24:09 Shaina: Coping with that while also showing up and being the person to whom your community can turn in really critical moments in someone's life, it's a lot for people to bear. And I don't think that was ever more true than over Labor Day weekend when there was this mass enforcement action targeting children in ORR custody. We saw legal partners throughout the country drop everything, drop their vacation plans and leave their families and have to drive out to shelters to counsel children who were being hauled onto planes in the middle of the night to attempt an extrajudicial deportation.

0:24:32 Thomas: Wow. Sorry. What was this specifically? They decided to specifically target children.

0:24:58 Shaina: Yeah. In the lead up to Labor Day weekend, a number of the the attorneys throughout our children's program started to report that they saw the master calendar hearings. Those are like the status dockets for kids that they were representing in custody. All of Guatemalan origin began to disappear from the court calendars. Then actually Senator Wyden of Oregon released a statement that got picked up in the press that he had reason to believe that 600 children whose country of origin was Guatemala were going to be returned without going through their court hearings by the U.S. government.

0:25:40 Shaina: That's how we went into Labor Day weekend. And then sure enough, right?

0:25:43 Thomas: Wow hope you didn't have any plans

0:25:47 Shaina: Well, you know, everybody was on high alert. And we got a lot of outreach from our network asking us if we had any understanding of what was about to happen or whether this was just a rumor. It's like whack -a -mole, right, just responding to everything that we're hearing in the press and everything thing that we're hearing from people in Congress and trying to figure out how to best serve a population of really vulnerable kids. And so sure enough, about midnight, we received a notice that over 100 children were going to be deported without any judicial process, which is patently illegal, right?

0:25:46 Matt: On

0:26:25 Thomas: They just decided to do an illegal thing just one of the many

0:26:30 Shaina: 15 minutes later, a private contractor of ICE showed up at the shelters and began hauling kids out of the shelters and onto planes. And the planes were actually sitting on the jetway when a federal judge called an emergency hearing on a Sunday morning.

0:26:48 Matt: A Sunday, right? From what I remember. That's right.

0:26:51 Shaina: Yeah, it was 9 .30 here in California. She called an urgency hearing and ordered the planes not to leave. And those kids were returned to the shelters, the government shelters where they had been kept. And of course, been struggling with their own mental health since this near miss. And the government represented that all of these kids either wanted to be returned or that their family members had asked for their return. And then later, government documents came to light. Guatemalan government documents come to light that actually refuted that whole premise. That particular moment of last year, I think, left a lot of the immigration attorneys that work with kids really shaken when they saw their own clients, you know, being held away. I mean, I remember there's this one lawyer who like drove to the airport in Harlingen, Texas, with a court order in her hand.

0:27:46 Matt: Yeah it's an enormous success story in one way, right, because it all of these people would work together very quickly to file a habeas claim to have the judge being that engaged. I mean, from what I remembered, she was reviewing the case at at two in the morning or something on Sunday before she had the hearing. In a way, it's a story about the system working when parts of it are failing. But it's also a story, I think, very much about the extra pressures and all of the many other things we now have to deal with that we never had to consider in the last 20 years.

0:28:12 Matt: It's outside of my imagination, I guess, that the government would have tried to do that before. And now we just have to be ready for that kind of thing. And I appreciate that you're talking about trauma -informed practice because you and I both started our careers in 2006. And, I don't know about you, but I don' t remember remember anybody talking about any of this in 2006. And I wish I'd known. I barely knew what PTSD was when I started working with asylum seekers and kids. Coming to understand where they're coming from and their behavior patterns and ways of communicating and just all of the things, and let alone, yes, yes.

0:28:40 Shaina: Yeah, and the way that trauma works in your brain, right? We expect people to tell very linear stories about how they were persecuted. And yet, that's not what trauma does to your brain.

0:28:50 Matt: And memory, yeah, no, everything. Even something as simple as people having trouble coming to their appointments on time because it's so hard for them to even think about coming to talk about this. We just come to understand that now. But there's that side of it. That we were just talking about of the effect on us as practitioners, which of course, I always want to be careful not to compare to what our clients are going through, what our communities are going throughout, but it's real. I'm sure anybody hearing that story that we're just talking about, about Labor Day weekend can imagine just the everyday stress of thinking that something like that can drop on a weekend and you have to drop everything and deal with it. I didn't actually know that that was part of Acacia Center's work, but I really appreciate that. That's something that we all need more of. We need to be talking about more. I really am big on mental health for lawyers now. What do those programs actually look like?

0:29:32 Shaina: We've been on this kind of trauma-informed organizational journey from the outset of Acacia. I am, as I said, the daughter of a social worker and a biologist. And so this is something that my parents talked about on a pretty regular basis that they thought I needed to know as a person navigating this world in my body with my particular experience. And having worked with refugees, particularly at the outset of my career, it was something that was acutely apparent to me when I started to feel hypervigilant. And when interviewing people about these just horrific stories, dreaming about people at night, dreaming about people's stories, the intrusive work thoughts.

0:30:14 Shaina: One of the things that we've really been working on and laboring on for a while is the idea of sustainability and capacity building, and you don't get to build the capacity that you want to. So to realize the vision of every person facing the full force and power of the prosecutorial powers of the U .S. government having quality defense, you don'T get to realize that vision if you're burning people out and if people are not recognizing the signs of trauma and taking breaks and not having unsustainable caseloads and all of that. We've done a lot of internal work on that, building people's awareness and their understanding of their own windows of tolerance, building a culture of hope and persistence. And we've taken those learnings to the field as well. And so we do trainings and and debrief sessions, and really take seriously the fact that people need to feel a sense of community. And this is a time of community. Leaning into community is what gets us through.

0:31:20 Matt: Right. That's really important to build that in. And I was impressed too when I was looking at your website with the practitioner hub that you have. All these resources for us in the field, who keeps that together? What's going on with that?

0:31:30 Shaina: Our wonderful learning and development team really pushed us to have not just these resources facing our programmatic networks, but also to ensure that those resources are available more more broadly for the immigration practitioner community. It's really a centralized source where people can go and look for the support they need on various legal issues that are coming up, supporting attorneys and those representing people in immigration proceedings is core to our mission. The stronger the representation, the more likely that people are going to be able to actually realize their life goals. And so this centralized resource is like everything from from training materials to practical tools to updates. I think we even have a practice advisory on like what to do if you're breastfeeding and you're an immigration practitioner, what you can ask for in terms of places to pump. I know that was an issue when I was having my kids.

0:32:30 Shaina: These are the challenging conditions that we work in. Do you pump from the parking lot of a, you know, detention center or? Yeah.

0:32:38 Thomas: I mean that's already a big enough issue in normal workplaces you know for that my wife had had an issue with I can only imagine something a job like that

0:32:48 Matt: Well, I wanted to mention too the enormous number of sample federal filings for practitioners is incredibly helpful. As we were just talking about with immigration attorneys getting more and more into federal court, I've been licensed in the federal court for a long time, but I haven't used it as much, anywhere near as much as I have in the past year. When you have to file in a hurry, just having these kinds of sample templates to work from is incredible. So this is just the broad range of services you're providing here. I don't know that there's anybody else that's doing this much in this many places.

0:33:15 Shaina: Well, thank you. We really try to listen to the legal community around us. We think of them as our partners, our field, and so really try to be responsive to the needs that people surface for us.

0:33:27 Matt: No, that's great. And actually, so since you do have this top -down view, I wanted to ask you, the reality of the funding is that the only people who are working with these programs right now are the ones who are most vulnerable with the kids and the adults with mental disabilities. But just in In terms of overall and in the system, even apart from that, what are the sort of challenges to representation, to access to justice, to counsel that you're seeing across the system right now?

0:33:47 Shaina: Access is now this huge barrier, actually accessing people in detention to people before they're transferred far away. The battles that our legal field has had just to get access to their clients, it really has been staggering in terms of the lack of adherence to the rule of law. And then that's even more true for people who don't already have a lawyer, right? Getting into a facility or getting even onto a secure phone call with your client becomes a task that is like weeks in length when it should be an immediate thing, right, like this is basic.

0:34:31 Shaina: Dealing with that challenge and tracking it and ensuring that That where possible, you're bringing these challenges to the appropriate fora to challenge their illegality is now something that I think attorneys are being tasked with doing that they had never done before. The real expansion of detention and the real egregious detention conditions that people are facing mean that many people who have legitimate forms of legal relief are experiencing detention fatigue and giving up their legal rights before a lawyer can even see them.

0:35:11 Thomas: What

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0:35:24 Shaina: All of the rules are flipped.

0:35:26 Thomas: Do you think would be the most surprising thing to people like me who I mean all through this show I have some exposure but to your to your average uh you know voter what do you think would be the most surprising thing about this entire system to them

0:35:27 Shaina: The burden of proof is not on the government, except for the basics of proving alienage. The burden of truth is not only government and often even that very baseline assumption. The government isn't waiting, right, in terms of their arbitrary detention of people who they suspect of being immigrant. They're not waiting to see that a person actually is an immigrant before detaining them. The rules of immigration proceedings and the lack of independence of the immigration judiciary, I think if most people knew about it, they would be horrified by it because it's not what we're taught in school about our justice system and why we have an adversarial process and where the burden of proof lies in the criminal proceedings context. There's a famous quote, and I forget who said it. I think it was a circuit court judge at the immigration court is handling death penalty cases in traffic court.

0:36:23 Thomas: Traffic court that was matt introduced that to us when we first came

0:36:27 Matt: I think about it all the time.

0:36:27 Thomas: On yeah it's yeah me

0:36:29 Shaina: I think it's even worse now. I'm trying to find what the analogy is, but it's gotten to a point where it's like, no, it's not even like traffic court because even there, there's like independence. Right.

0:36:34 Thomas: Too yeah I pine for traffic court yeah

0:36:42 Matt: Yeah. Right. I mean, at least when the cop doesn't show up in traffic court, you get the ticket dismissed. So that's not going to happen.

0:36:48 Thomas: Not even as good as traffic court

0:36:50 Matt: No, that's very true. Any other programs we haven't talked about you wanted to plug while you're here?

0:36:54 Shaina: If people are looking to get involved in really kind of protecting the civil rights and and human rights of not just their neighbors and their community, but themselves. There are so many wonderful local organizations on the ground that are partnering with Acacia. And so I really encourage them to take a look around our website. We have partners in almost every jurisdiction in the country. They need the human support now as much as they need people to be sharing their monetary resources. They also need the human support and connection. People are relying more and more on volunteers for linguistic needs, for accompanying kids to school when parents are afraid to send their kids to schools. This is a moment for real civic engagement. Civil society in the U .S. is broadly under threat and is a pillar for protecting democracy writ large. The more people are able to get involved at the local level and to really support organizations, including mutual aid funds that are really showing up in this moment, the more of a chance we have to protect all of our civil liberties.

0:38:09 Shaina: I would just leave with that particular plug in mind.

0:38:13 Matt: I was going to encourage listeners, especially around both the court observation and and court support, court accompaniment, the programs you're talking about. There's a lot you can do as a regular person to help these communities and these people going through these proceedings.

0:38:20 Thomas: Something that uh ordinary folks can help out with and without out and and some of those like you're saying so some of that you can just watch like online you could be able to

0:38:33 Shaina: Yes. Although we've seen some hijinks with that recently. But yes, you should be able to both see WebEx hearings. Thanks.

0:38:36 Thomas: Observe hijinks is too delightful a word for this fascist administration they don't get hijinks don't give them hijinks that's not they're not rapscallions you know they're ne 'er -do

0:38:48 Matt: And knowing

0:38:52 Shaina: I'm trying to stay away from

0:38:56 Thomas: -wells yeah yeah that's fair yeah no that's right Right. So hijinks happen. Yeah, no, that's great. So yeah, we'll definitely shoot up all the links that we can in the show notes if people want to help out. Is there anything else you want to throw out there?

0:38:57 Shaina: The expletives that might usually come to my tongue.

0:39:11 Shaina: There have been a lot of people recently, I think, coming out of everything that has gone down in Minnesota that are realizing that looking away is not enough, right?

0:39:21 Thomas: Absolutely.

0:39:21 Shaina: Feeling like, oh, God, I can't watch the news. I can't read another story. It's breaking my heart every day. But But paying attention, staying persistent, keeping eyes on is how we get out of this crisis. And there is a burgeoning humanitarian crisis that is taking shape in our country right now. It's only going to be with concerted and persistent engagement that we can turn this ship around.

0:39:51 Matt: That you're doing something in any of the ways we're talking about is one of the best cures for that feeling. I really believe it. I appreciate all of these different programs that you are supporting and just this incredible work that Acacia is doing across the country. It's really incredible. Thank you for it. Really, thank you for your time today and it's great to talk to you.

0:40:05 Thomas: Keep up the good work.

0:40:06 Shaina: Good to talk to you, too. Thank you.

0:40:43 Thomas: Pine for traffic court. Days and hours are units of time. Guys, earth is a spinning rock around the sun.