'Stretched thin': Immigration attorney describes constant stream of cases

KELLY GORDON: A large part of the story of the last two months has played out in the courts. That involves many cases of people detained, at times unlawfully, by federal immigration officers. MPR News has reported that the federal government has quickly moved detainees to other states, which has made it difficult for families and attorneys to locate them. And judges from across the Midwest are coming in to help keep up with a constant stream of challenges to those detentions.

Gloria Contreras Edin is one of the attorneys behind those challenges. She's an immigration lawyer based in Saint Paul, and she joins me now. Welcome to Minnesota Now, Gloria.

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Hi, Kelly. How are you?

KELLY GORDON: I'm good. Thank you for being here. So we've been kind of on this theme. Tell me what a typical day is like for you right now, two months into this surge of federal immigration officers in Minnesota.

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: OK, I'm stretched thin. I'm full workload, because we already were very busy, and now it feels like I'm working in an emergency room. It is a constant, active, persistent pushing of habeas corpus petitions and trying to protect clients who were picked up in the middle of the night, and wanting to get those files into the federal system so that they're not swept away and taken to another part of the country.

KELLY GORDON: And that is something that's been happening, right? I mean, people have been very quickly taken to Texas. And so how does that complicate your job?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Well, it's complicated my life. I mean, I had a wonderful trip planned last week, all week, with Minnesota Public Radio, and I wasn't able to go just because I filed six habeas corpus petitions. Some were filed in the middle of the night.

I mean, I'll receive a phone call at 11:00, and by 2:30 in the morning, I'm filing a petition, just because in the morning, they may take my client to Texas. And so we're working day and night. It's not only complicated the work that we're doing, but it's certainly complicated our overall, livelihood.

KELLY GORDON: I'm curious, how many habeas corpus sorts of cases that you bring normally? Said that you're always busy, which is true for most immigration attorneys. It's a very confusing system for people to navigate. But how has that even changed?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: The change has been dramatic. I may have filed two in my entire career as an immigration lawyer for nearly 20 years. I have now filed, like, in the last 30 days across the country, 22, and we're going to file another four more this week. I'm filing three today. And so we're just working day and night. And oftentimes, we don't what to expect in the morning. Because we may get a phone call that someone was just picked up last night or picked up on Sunday, and so we have to work quickly, despite having a very busy Monday in the first place.

KELLY GORDON: I'm just thinking, too, for people who maybe are just tuning in, they're not super familiar with the whole process. Can you tell people real quick, what a habeas corpus case even is?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Yes. A habeas corpus petition is essentially a constitutional tool. It's a constitutional tool that essentially, it allows someone who's detained to ask a judge to consider their detention. It's one of the oldest constitutional protections we have. And it essentially stops someone from unlawfully detaining you. And here, the government is unlawfully detaining many individuals.

And it's a powerful tool because we can also attach a temporary restraining order to it. And we can ask the judge to, for example, stop the jurisdiction, so keeping people here in Minnesota, as opposed to moving them to Texas or anywhere else. And then we can ask for a variety of things-- immediate release or we ask the judge to provide a bond for the individual.

KELLY GORDON: And how long does it take for those petitions to work their way through the court? Are they usually heard within 24 hours, or is there even a backlog there?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: There is a backlog in some states. So, for example, in the state of Texas, the numbers of habeas have grown exponentially over the last few weeks, and so it's taking much longer on some of those petitions. But for the ones here in Minnesota, I've seen a 10-day turnaround. In some cases where there's unique circumstances-- for example, if there's a woman who's nursing her baby may have her hearing heard much faster than an individual who doesn't have small children at home. And so it completely depends on the circumstances. For the most part, we see about a 10-day turnaround here in Minnesota.

KELLY GORDON: You've been a lawyer across multiple presidential administrations so you've experienced changes in immigration policy and efforts to ramp up or ramp down deportations. Does this remind you, what we're in right now, of any previous moments in your career?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: You know, it doesn't-- not like this. It's essentially what I'm seeing now is that the Department of Homeland Security, through CBP and ICE, are refashioning the Constitution in front of our eyes. It's sort of just this new interpretation of what is a reasonable suspicion, what is a reasonable stop. They're really pushing the limits on conduct that we never thought before we'd ever see.

When we see people being detained and then they're not in a system where we can locate them sometimes 48, sometimes more, three, four days, where we can't find someone, I've never seen anything quite like this. It's sort of like a layered crisis. And it's overloaded not only the federal court system, but it's overloaded the ICE agents locally, and it's overloaded the immigration court system.

So although I have always seen a very busy docket over the last 20 years, I've never seen anything like this with, in addition to the massive backlogs that we've always talked about, now we're seeing individuals who are just randomly taken somewhere else and we don't where they're at for three, four days. And so it's just unusual because it makes it very hard to determine jurisdiction and to determine where we can file.

And sometimes, individuals have medical needs and we can't get to that. And so we have individuals, for example, who need heart medication or who need diabetes medication, and we can't get that to them for at least four or five days. And we worry, very much, especially people who are older or have a serious medical issue.

KELLY GORDON: Right. We've heard from attorneys from a variety of disciplines volunteering their time right now because I have to imagine that attorneys themselves are really struggling to keep up with the need. Is that true?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Yes. We have recruited attorneys from all disciplines. And I'll tell you, it is refreshing. It is fun to see the collegiality across the sectors of disciplines as attorneys. That's one of the best things I've seen come out of this, this collective coordination to really come together and to protect the Constitution. I feel like the Constitution is on fire, and we're helping to put it out every single day in real time.

KELLY GORDON: Right. I'm wondering, too, if you've had any successes? I saw something on social media yesterday from an attorney who, like you just said, has been kind of willingly conscripted into the service of working in immigration cases. And he was saying that the return home of Liam Ramos was so heartening. He said, I have not talked to an attorney today who has not cried over the fact that happened, that he was returned home. Have you seen any success stories like that?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Oh, we have. We've seen numerous success stories. And it's not just the little Liam's, but it's also the women who are returned to their nursing babies, or it's the father who was really close to his children and his young children just embrace him as soon as he gets out. These are humans. They're individuals with real lives, who have just, they're like everyone else here in Minnesota.

And what we've seen, unfortunately, is many of these individuals do not have a criminal history, and they have some sort of deferred action. And so that's been the hardest part, is that individuals with employment authorization, deferred action, folks who are refugees, we've seen them detained for sometimes up to a month. And to see them come home has just been extraordinarily rewarding for me as an attorney, but also just as a human, right?

I mean, it just seems wrong to implement our immigration system without a sense of humanity and concern for individuals who are parents, for example, or individuals who are elderly, or I had a client recently who has breast cancer, and she's been detained for two months. She was finally released. So we're super grateful.

But to think about those things, especially when someone doesn't have a criminal history, I think, that's critical. I think we can do both things. We can implement our immigration laws and at the same time have a humanitarian interest as we're doing it.

KELLY GORDON: Do you think that this season of everything that's happening right now will have any lasting impacts on how you do your work?

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: It's hard know what will come out, and it's really hard to say how this will impact my work in the future. It's really hard to set client expectations, for example, when we don't what's going to happen from week to week. For example, we were at some point offering bond motions for individuals who are eligible for bond, and then within one week, the same judge, who may have provided that person with a bond, then denies another individual for bond with the same set of facts and claims that they don't have jurisdiction. Whereas a week prior, they did.

And so maintaining client expectations during this time is really hard. It's just like everything's moving so quickly. And it's difficult not only for attorneys know how to engage with clients, but then setting those expectations so that clients are not disappointed and feel like the United States and the system of due process that we have has not let them down. And many times, they do feel that way.

KELLY GORDON: Yeah. Gloria, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for coming on Minnesota Now to give us your perspective.

GLORIA CONTRERAS EDIN: Thank you, Kelly. It was really great talking to you.

KELLY GORDON: That was Gloria Contreras Edin. She's an immigration attorney based in Saint Paul.