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L4GG in the News
Estuardo Cifuentes Luarte applied for asylum on the Texas-Mexico border, but his request was denied under Title 42 during the Trump administration. Cifuentes, who is gay, left Guatemala after being attacked and harassed by police for being seen with his husband.
After five years, Cifuentes was granted asylum in the U.S.
Priscilla Orta, director of Project Corazon, has been advising people to leave Texas if they can. New immigrants may be able to cross the border into Texas, she said, but “they just won’t leave. It’s Hotel California up in here.” (I worked with Orta at Project Corazon, which is run by Lawyers for Good Government, in an independent clinic as a law student this winter. I met Ira after she messaged Project Corazon on Facebook, and am currently working on her asylum case.)
Before S.B. 4, people who crossed could—if they fled a credible threat and found legal assistance within one year of arriving—apply for asylum as a defense against deportation. Those who could prove that they had been persecuted had a shot at a permanent status; at the very least, while their cases were pending, they could live and work in the United States.
If S.B. 4 takes hold, these limited rights would be crushed.
Estuardo Cifuentes nunca imaginó que un solo beso alteraría tan drásticamente el rumbo de su vida.
Poco tiempo después de esa muestra de afecto a su novio Brayan Mejía, este propietario de una empresa de marketing en Guatemala se vio confrontado a la discriminación por su orientación sexual, que finalmente desembocó en acoso, las amenazas de secuestro y la decisión de tener que huir de su país para salvar su existencia.
Ser un hombre gay en Guatemala y hacer ese pequeño gesto atrajo la atención de la policía, quienes detuvieron a Cifuentes para luego golpearlo. Tras denunciar a los agentes por el asalto físico, la víctima fue amenazada, y el acoso empezó.
The U.S. has granted asylum to a Guatemalan LGBTQ activist who fled his country in 2019.
Estuardo Cifuentes and his partner ran a digital marketing and advertising business in Guatemala City.
He previously told the Washington Blade that gang members extorted from them. Cifuentes said they closed their business after they attacked them.
Cifuentes told the Blade that Guatemalan police officers attacked him in front of their home when he tried to kiss his partner. Cifuentes said the officers tried to kidnap him and one of them shot at him. He told the Blade that authorities placed him under surveillance after the incident and private cars drove past his home.
Priscilla Orta, a local advocate and director of Project Corazon at Lawyers for Good Government, said simply: “There is no crisis.” She added: “I think that part of the border is by far the most secure, the safest, the most well-regulated. The most empathetic [federal law enforcement] are the border unit here in Brownsville.”
Biden campaigned for the White House on fixing what he still admits three years in is America’s broken immigration system. It may be fairer than Trump’s but is not the orderly and humane system candidate Biden promised.
Orta believes Biden hasn’t tackled the system comprehensively.
“The real problem is that we don’t have enough judges to decide cases and we don’t have enough asylum officers. From top to bottom, the immigration system no longer reflects the needs of the 21st century,” she said.
In response to this seismic shift, Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), in partnership with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, initiated a vital project.
Recognizing the urgent need for accessible, up-to-date legal information for health care providers, lawyers, and advocates, this collaboration aimed to develop a comprehensive, 50-state legislative resource. The Policy Resource Hub (the “Hub”) was envisioned as a guiding light in the intricate legal terrain that emerged post-Dobbs.
Priscilla Orta is a supervising attorney with the nonprofit Lawyers For Good Government, which offers pro bono legal services to asylum-seekers. She says enticing lawyers to go down the immigration law path is tough, it’s even tougher if there are fewer out there.
“It’s a perfect storm. More people aren’t going to law school. More people are coming. It’s very difficult to be an immigration lawyer, not just financially but emotionally. And those of us who are still in the business, we do not have the funding we need to help more people. We can help many more people but we need more support,” Orta told Border Report on Wednesday.
Each judge closed on average around 975 cases in Fiscal Year 2022, but it is not nearly enough to close the backlog, says Priscilla Orta, of Lawyer for Good Government.
“This is like, you know, a classic, I Love Lucy episode when they’re trying to catch the chocolates. It’s just not gonna happen. There’s not enough people,” says Orta, supervising attorney for the nonprofit’s Project Corazon, which is based in Brownsville and helps to provide free legal services for asylum seekers.
But Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney at Brownsville, Texas-based Lawyers for Good Government, which provides legal aid to migrants, said separations aren’t common in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, noting that Customs and Border Protection drops people off at designated locations. Few migrants stay overnight because even if family members are processed separately, there is little delay before they reunite at a welcome center. Spouses are often processed together, she said.
“If you came here you’d have absolutely no idea that thousands of people were processed daily,” Orta said. “There’s zero chaos.”
Abortion rights advocates argue that travel bans — such as the ones some Texas cities have passed to stop people from seeking abortions in neighboring New Mexico — won’t survive constitutional scrutiny. They say such laws are attempts to intimidate and scare women.
But Alyssa Morrison, an attorney at the progressive advocacy organization Lawyers for Good Government, said that doesn’t mean pregnant people or anyone trying to help them obtain reproductive health care won’t be sued, subjected to a criminal investigation or locked up.
“The idea of being investigated is utterly terrifying for most people,” she said.
Morrison said there’s also massive confusion about the specific exceptions to various state abortion bans, especially among doctors who could face criminal prosecution for performing the procedure.
“Because these laws are written in the most ambiguous terms, a lot of physicians are unsure if they will end up in jail for doing their job,” she said.
Priscilla Orta, supervising attorney of Project Corazon at Lawyers for Good Government, said curtailing asylum protections would contribute to human rights violations around the world.
“If this proposed deal goes through, thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives will be returned to their home countries to once again face persecution and death. Many will die,” she said. “These changes to asylum law would violate our international obligations and decimate decades-old immigration laws that were passed with almost unanimous support. We categorically oppose any attempts to build even higher barriers to asylum and reject Trump-like attempts to dismantle our asylum system. We are better than this.”
McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — Low-income migrants arrested in Texas under Operation Lone Star can receive legal counsel, the state’s highest court says, and that’s welcome news for a nonprofit that represents migrants in court.
Priscilla Orta, supervising attorney for Lawyers for Good Government’s Project Corazon, which provides free legal aid for migrants, says she is glad that the state’s highest court understands the need for migrants in Texas to have legal representation.
“It does help folks. First, it helps them understand what is going on and what the consequences are. Second, it helps those that want to fight, and actually defend their cases. And third, it forces the government to be accountable for their actions,” Orta told Border Report on Monday.
Lawyers for Good Government has honored four BigLaw firms for their pro bono efforts this year in human rights, climate change, reproductive health and racial justice.
The nonprofit organization said Wednesday that Kirkland & Ellis LLP had received the 2023 Pro Bono Paragon Award for its commitment and contributions to the pro bono programs of Lawyers for Good Government or L4GG.
A water affordability crisis looms over Benton Harbor, Michigan, according to a new report from the Benton Harbor Community Water Council. The report criticized the state and federal government’s response to the lead crisis that started in 2018 and called for a slate of reforms to prevent and respond to future drinking water issues and to ensure water will be affordable for city residents.
New report says Benton Harbor’s already above-average water rates will need to be raised 20% every year for the next nine years to eliminate an annual operating deficit.
Tucked deep within President Biden’s landmark climate bill sits a seemingly small tweak to IRS rules that, for the first time, lets companies sell their clean energy tax credits.
The change accounts for just a fraction of the 100,000 or so words in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which Congress passed in 2022. But experts say that by making clean energy tax credits more accessible, the move will help drive most of the government’s investment in the sector over the next decade and supercharge the industry.
Jillian Blanchard is an attorney helping the NAACP in its intervention. She said the push for the IURC standards would help consolidate the equity responsibilities for utilities.
“Without a centralized order requiring standardized, equitable measures in one place, each individual utility may choose to do their own separate policy through their own what's called integrated review planning process,” Blanchard said.
Indiana is set to receive $100 million in federal funding to expand electric vehicle, or EV, charging infrastructure. The NAACP is in part asking for transparency, commitment to minority business enterprise, ethnically diverse workforce hiring, placing EV infrastructure near minority-owned businesses, and air quality. They are also asking that 40% of the funding be used in disadvantaged communities.
“These decisions are occurring at a time where there’s historic level funding to invest in EV infrastructure, which can either serve to start to tackle climate change and historic decades of environment racism or exacerbate inequities in this state,” Jillian Blanchard with Lawyers for Good Government said.
President Joe Biden’s climate image remains a major political liability going into the 2024 election, new polling suggests, even as states begin to tap hundreds of billions of dollars made available for clean energy and other climate-related projects under a landmark bill that Biden signed into law last year.
Most Americans—some 57 percent—disapprove of Biden’s handling of climate change, according to a new poll conducted jointly by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland. The poll also found that just a quarter of Americans know “a good amount” or “a great deal” about the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law that dedicates about $370 billion to efforts to bring down the nation’s carbon emissions, boost the development of clean energy and reduce the persistent pollution disparities faced by historically marginalized communities.
Priscilla Orta, supervising attorney for the nonprofit Lawyers For Good Government’s Project Corazon program, questioned whether Salinas’ Jr.,’ actions were legal.
“The real legal question is whether the city council or mayor has the right to take a public property and make it private under Texas law?” Orta told Border Report on Wednesday.
Her organization helps asylum-seekers who are waiting south of the border, and she has been outraged by recent reports that forces positioned on the border in Eagle Pass were told to turn back migrants into the river and to deny them water and other resources when they tried to cross into the United States.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has blocked the Biden administration's asylum rule for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his ruling on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in Oakland, California, deemed the rules unlawful, saying they imposed conditions on asylum-seekers that Congress didn't intend.
“The ruling is a victory, but each day the Biden administration prolongs the fight over its illegal ban, many people fleeing persecution and seeking safe harbor for their families are instead left in grave danger,” Katrina Eiland, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued the case, said in a statement to the press.
What happens now?
Tigar’s ruling is on hold for 14 days to give the government time to appeal. That appeal is expected to be filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Nothing changes for 14 days. … And we wait to see if the 9th [Circuit Court of Appeals] says, ‘The asylum ban continues while we reach a decision,’” Priscilla Orta, an immigration lawyer in Brownsville, Texas, told VOA.
Orta has been crossing the border into Matamoros, Mexico, almost weekly to explain to migrants the process they are about to face.
But Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney for Project Corazon, a part of Lawyers For Good Government, told Border Report on Wednesday the processing of children should be immediate so they can be transferred to other federal agencies that are more equipped to meet their needs.
“CBP was never designed to house children. And it was never designed to house anyone long term. And it was never designed to really house people with serious medical needs. That was never ever ever the design. CBP was designed to process people at the border, check their papers and and then either give them to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), or parole,” Orta said.
Orta said the additional responsibilities placed on CBP officers, such as conducting credible fear interviews, further strains their resources and stretches thin services, and can lead to more dire consequences.
As Republican lawmakers have pushed restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming care in recent months, Democratic-led states have increasingly responded by passing so-called shield laws to protect people who undergo such care against the possibility they could one day face prosecution.
Nearly a dozen states – including Washington state, Colorado, New Mexico and Minnesota – have passed shield laws, and several governors have issued executive orders with similar protections, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health that supports abortion rights, and advocacy group Lawyers for Good Government.
On a June afternoon when temperatures climbed near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius), Alejandra Pena gently tipped a jug of water into her son’s mouth. Like other children in the migrant camp, a mile-long stretch of tents along the banks of the river separating Mexico from the United States, the toddler had diarrhea. Pena worried the boy was dehydrated.
“Drink, Natanael. Drink,” Pena coaxed. One of the few humanitarian groups operating in the camp had told her Natanael was malnourished and underweight, she said, attributing his condition to the lack of clean water and poor sanitation in the camp.
Asylum seeker Estuardo Cifuentes testified to the horrors of waiting in Mexico while seeking safety in the U.S.
“I was one of the more than 75,000 people who were sent to Mexico from the United States under the ‘Remain in Mexico’ program of the Trump administration,” said Cifuentes, a client services manager for Lawyers for Good Government. “I was trying to protect my life from persecution by the government of Guatemala solely for being a member of the LGBTQ community. And for more than 18 months, I was exposed to the insecurity and the lack of basic resources in a country where I had already been kidnapped for 21 days.”
While that wave of migrants faced the Migrant Protection Protocols under Trump, those who followed encountered Title 42 and, eventually, the Biden asylum ban, Cifuentes said.
“People are in a limbo. They are exposed to different violations of their rights. There is the lack of security, the lack of food, the lack of shelters — it’s getting worse every day. And every day thousands of migrants are living on the streets without access to food and drinking water, and they have to decide whether to buy internet for their phone to request an appointment in the CBP One app or buy at food for the children.”
Title 42 expulsions are no more, but policies such as the Biden administration’s online asylum applications and a so-called “travel ban” are putting LGBTQ migrants in harm’s way, according to U.S. and Latin American advocates.
Guatemalan migrant Estuardo Cifuentes said he experienced insecurity and a lack of shelter and other resources when he and more than 70,000 other asylum-seekers returned to Mexico under the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program. The LGBTQ activist who fled his country because of threats said he experienced harsh conditions during his stay in Mexico, which he says have only gotten worse with time.
“Policies change, but conditions become more difficult every day,” he said, referring to migrants living on the streets in Mexico, being victimized by criminals and lacking the technology – internet access and literacy – to apply for an asylum appointment online.
By the time Kat set foot in the safe house in Reynosa, she had already escaped death’s grip twice.
The first time was in her native Honduras. A criminal gang had gone after Kat’s grandfather and killed him. Then they came for her cousin. Fearful that she would be next, Kat decided she needed to get out of the country. She and her 6-year-old son left Honduras and began the trek north to the United States, where she hoped they could find a safer life.
It was January 2023 when the two made it to the Mexican border city of Reynosa. They were exhausted but alive, free from the shadow of the fatal threats bearing down on their family in Honduras.
But within weeks of their arrival, a cartel active in the area kidnapped Kat and her son. This is not uncommon in Reynosa, one of Mexico’s most violent cities, where criminal groups routinely abduct vulnerable migrants like Kat so they can extort their relatives for cash. Priscilla Orta, a lawyer who worked on Kat’s case and shared her story with me, explained that newly-arrived migrants along the border have a “look.” “Like you don’t know where you are” is how she put it. Criminals regularly prey upon these dazed newcomers.
People with acute medical conditions or facing imminent threats of murder, rape, kidnapping or other “exceptionally compelling circumstances” can request priority status, but only in person at a port of entry. The app does not allow input of case details.
Priscilla Orta, an immigration attorney with Lawyers for Good Government in Brownsville, Texas, said one Honduran woman in the Mexican border city of Reynosa said a man whom she accuses of raping her tracked her down though her phone, which she was using to secure an appointment.
The woman was raped again, said Orta, who has not been able to reach her since.
“That is harrowing to realize that you’re just going to have to put up with the abuses in Mexico and just kind of continue to take it because if you don’t, then you could forever hurt yourself in the long term,” the lawyer said.