Peak of what acting secretary called the breaking point in el paso. So many of the families i spoke to in that church had 10 days in processing facility. Earlier portions of the discussion from the daylong migration policy, we are live now for a paneldiscussion on Immigration Law. And to see so many legal professionals advocates, students in the audience. And we are looking forward to a robust discussion among our three expert panelists and a very strong question and answer period. So ill start, just basically with a few remarks. My name is anna gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and we are an Affiliate Organization with over 370 members in 49 states across the United States. I always like to say were sort of the sleeping giant. We are a quiet organization. Folks mightnot know our name as quickly as they know the aclu or other organizations. However, we do a lot of the groundwork. The support and represent lower incomeimmigrants across the United States. We do, we help build their programs. We train them. We do advocacy. We also have a religious Immigration Services division represents and helps bring sisters, brothers, priests, clergy to work in immigrant communities. And in the last year, we added our litigation. We up, increase our litigation quite a bit and have been involved as organizational plaintiffs or have been directly litigating and suing the United States government for many of the policies we will discuss today and especially on this panel. So were very happy to be here. One important thing id like to share with you is our work at the border. We recently started with all the asylum project in august of this year. We generally do not do Operations Area the clinic does all the building, supporting, accompanying and advocating area that we dont do operations but when theres a great need and we are asked to do so we step in getting the great need at the border after seeing thousands of people stranded without Legal Counsel we decided to start and watchand asylum projects. We are working closely in collaboration with diet and youll hear more about that from sue. And this project involves providing know your rights talks to the thousands of immigrants, forced migrants in juarez, consultations to identify potential options for really and how we can represent them. We also are doing representation. Were creating a pipeline from agency, teaching about rights, consultation, identifying attorneys in the us to take these cases so i would urge you to go to our website and look at that project and also volunteer. We are starting to invite and have attorneys down and work with my staff down there. With the migrants to help them with their cases so please go to our website, sign up as a volunteer support and share with your other folds. So that the established, what were going to do is to move forward now with the panelists, what we intend to do is to talk to you about the origin of some of these policies we will talk about race issues. When talking aboutthese origins, were going to talk about nuts and bolts, what it looks like on the ground and were going to talk about the human face ofit. While i was preparing for this panel we had a call. And i asked joel rose who is our reporter on the panel what struck him most when he started reporting on this issue and he talked about the complexity area so i have to share with you after 30 years doing thiswork, i wake up every day , theres new things happening and theres plenty that i dont understand so i think were all in thistogether. Hopefully we can clarify some of these things for today. And share our experiences with you. So just moving on to our panelists, id like to introduce you to dylan corbett, he is the founding director of the whole Border Institute. Which is a Research Policy work leadership and Development Action organization. Uniqueto the United States and mexico border regions. The project turned for in may of this year. Dylan brings a unique perspective to this panel and that he worked in washington dc and now hes on the border so he sees it from both sides. And he will talk to you about why the whole Border Institute was started and share his experiences along the border and talk about it in terms of also the recent el paso shootings. We have kenny from hyatt, i always mispronounce it. From ise, shes director of the border and asylum network. She has been working, sheand her team have been working this past year on developing processes along the border. Purposes for the fourth migrants. And she also puts fellows in different places along the border to assist the migrants here. Shes going to share her role , why they do the work and shes going to explain to us not and bolts. What is happening on the border. Acategory facing the migrants , these procedures and what we can do and are doing. And finally we have joel rose , immigration reporter for npr. He puts a human face on these complex issues. Hes relatively new to the immigration sphere anything quite busy so im looking forward to hearing old story and with that im going to pass it over todylan to start our discussion. Thank you, then honor to be here and to receive the invitation to be able to speak with you and im really honored to be among friends and colleagues on the panel and with my friends in clinic and thank you for the work youre doing at the border. Been great to collaborate on that and its so important to work you all are doing. I also understand that its, its an exclusive club night, everyone is invited to see. So im honored to be able to have something to say to you all. I do want to talk a little bit about and i thought it might beappropriate to talk about the situation in el paso. I come from a Border Institute, we work in a binational way. Hard to talk about these immigration issues without acknowledging what happens back on august 3, just two months now. So on august 3 as you know there was someone who drove 650 miles another part of texas, a faraway place to come to el paso texas. And the lives of 22 latinos. And both will for us right now are still rash, the physical wounds, the psychological wounds, the spiritual wounds. And so were still dealing with that. But if anything was made clear because of what happened on august third, with that much and a and i use the word my hands on purpose to cause of the historical reverberations with whats gone on before with the killing and the persecution and torture and lynching latinos on the border. This has been going on for a while, theres historical precedent. If theres anything made clear on that day was the same politics of exclusion, the same policies of the xena phobia that are driving the policies that were seeing on the border in some way directly or indirectly we can have an argument about that but that same spirit of xena phobia drove what happened on that day. And there are parallels. And there are residences between what happened and what were seeing on the border. So i was going to talk about the different policies and different changes , Different Things were seeing on the border. Just as we are on august 3, were dazed and confused, wounded by all these changes were seeing in rapid succession. Its like being at the end of the firehose but if theres one thing that i would say from ourperspective on the border need to keep in mind , whether its running in mexico, whether its sending people to different countries, whether its the deployment of the military, policies to make people wait in mexico because their metered or being turned back on the bridge, etc. , at the end of the day the only policy of the Us Government on the border with respect to migration is simply to turn. Its deterrence at all costs. And its deterrence whether that is deadly or not. People are dying on the usmexico border. People are dying in the custody of the Us Government. On the border. And that deterrence has a couple faces. Think of it as a coin. Onthe one side its criminalization. And weve seen its been going on for some time now. But the Us Government is simply criminalizing more and more people convincing other americans that we have to fear that people are coming to theborder to the point where legal asylumseekers, asylum is effectively over at the border. Asylum occurs are treated as criminals whether there thrown back to a dangerous city like transport. On the other side of the coin you have what we see every day on the border the militarization of the border. The hardening of the border. More agents, more money, more resources. The militarization of our committee with checkpoints and helicopters and walls, etc. Etc. All the things effectively we have now a wall on the usmexico border whether the wall policy, locate or a physical wall which is being built in our community. Those are the two sides of the coin. And their historical precedents of that too. The reality is this has been going on for some time. And its been an evil Bible Congress and the administration, the white house. Its been enabled by democrats and republicans. There is a categorical difference between whats going on then and now withthe Trump Administration and its this. Its simply the rat colony with which these policies are implemented and embraced and the cruelty with which their implemented area thats the difference. The toolbox is there and its been there for a long time but its the rat colony and its the cruelty. And thats why its sodeadly. And again, none of this is responding to actual policy at the border. Theres simply no argument to be made that what were doing is policies of criminalization and these policies of militarization are effective, sensible, rational policies from any point of view. Democratically, they just dont make any sense and so because of that, its impossible for us not to see and this is what was clarified. If theres any doubt on the border on august its impossible for us not to see these are driven by a politics of fear, by a politics of hate and the xena phobia and it has become deadly. And not just for migrants anymore. But for people in el paso and it has to stop. [applause] thank you dylan and before we move on, we spoke a little bit when we started about why the hope Border Institute was created. Id like you to share a little bit about what we talked about. The hope Border Institute as anna said we turned for over the summer and we were driven by what happened in 2014. Again in 2014 you saw the rise of the arrivals from the usmexico border. So the desire for the community was there were a lot of things that happened at that time, humanitarian response just the influx of folks coming to the usmexico border. Lots of humanitarian assistance, lots of outpouring of volunteers but we realize what we needed to do as a community was to be able to work in a binational way across borders to make sure that our aspirations , our hope, our imagination, our vision was implemented in places Like Washington dc because these policies which are affecting the usmexico border and again, this has gone on for a long time whether its austin texas or mexico city or new york city, wall street or washington dc. The policies that come out of those places affects our community and often we dont have a voice, we have no way to have a role. Were not at the decisionmaking table so we do education, advocacy and policy work as we believe solutions to these problems ought to come from the border and if our border is going to be affected coming from far off places Like Washington dc and we deserve a place at the table so thats why were here. Now we will move on to sue was going to talk to us. Her work with hyatt, what theyre doing and the details of the work and whats going on on the ground. Thank you anna. So hyatt you may be wondering , i didnt know they were at the border. That seems strange. Hyatt has been around since 1881 and weve always done asylum but in the last year weve decided to expand our asylum work and focus on the border and that was made possible by a strong by the American Jewish community. They stepped up and funded this work and all our work is been so far on the usmexico border funded by jewish unity foundations, jewish donors. So i managed all of hyatts programs on both sides of the border currently as the director of border and asylum network. On the us side we started with a program called the hyatt border fellows whereby we fund fulltime attorneys to work with organizations on the ground at the border, to serve more asylumseekers. One of our border fellows is here with us today, he palazzo. Hes here with the immigrant Advocacy Center in el paso. We had another fellow in san diego and were goingto be adding more fellows as well. Of the border Fellows Project is also to support pro bono delegations of attorneys from around the country to travel to our Partner Organizations to spend a week with them to add more capacities and serve more asylumseekers. You can find out about volunteer opportunities. Most exciting recently has been in june, in august we opened an office in juarez. The first hyatt mexico office. We have, we are funded by unhcr mexico and its currently a legal office only to mexico and attorneys to paralegals and we work closely with the clinic staff on the ground in el paso to do the know youre right stations, one on one screenings and refer clients to people like nico, our border fellows on the other side of the border to try to get someone out of mpp for example. That ought torepresent them in their full asylum case. We are expanding that work , unh cr has asked us to submit a proposal to work and also tijuana, mexicali and montenegro so my next one we hope to be operational in those locations and were also expanding beyond Legal Services to include services for Mental HealthPsychosocial Support and services for survivors of genderbased violence in all four of thoselocations. So ive been to the border a lot in the last year. I think i this is my sixth time and im not the one doing the work that im the one working with our partners, working with the lawyers and implementing the programs. And i also communicate on a regular basis with the lawyers that are down there doing the work and theres a Facebook Group called migrants persecutions protocol. Which is what the mvp should be called instead of migrant protection protocol. And i asked them yesterday on Facebook Whats the number one thing they would like this audience to know and the responses were the situation is worse thanyou think. Its inhumane. People human rights are completely disregarded. Just howdangerous it is. People are kidnapped virtually every day from right outside theimmigration office where there dropped off. Even for lawyers, one lawyer mentioned shes looking into kidnapping insurance now because its so dangerous. Particularly in the area of the border across fromseville and mcallen. Its so dangerous for all involved. As someone on the first panel mentioned, human rights search recently reported in 340 public accounts of rape, kidnapping and violent assault but thats underreported, its probably double that. People sleeping in streaks intense , not just in water and even when they can get into a shelter, a shelter quality varies rightly. So its a very dire, its more dire than you think it is is what theywanted me to let you know. And also in terms of the lawyers, theres a complete assault on due process. There is no access to counsel which is most obvious one on the mtas, the notice to appear , the addresses for the migrants are fake addresses. Usually its for a shelter that they never even been to and some mtas are listing facebook as the address for the migrants. There are no longer going to the interpreters provided, theyre going to be shown a video explaining their rights but no actual interpreters do it during the hearing. And then theres the Tennis Courts that are happening in brownsville and the judges that are only appearing by a tv screen and so they dont have the opportunity to judge the body language of the migrants and really be able to assess their credibility. So the order of the day is chaos and confusion and its designed to be that way. Its designed to be cruel. And theres no normal area sometimes people ask only a normal day. There is no normal and again, its designed to be that way because everything unpredictable im going to walk you through the process. This may be elementary but i figure theres a lot of people here dont know the nuts and bolts of how things work. But starting with metering, metering is the process by which you instead of being able to present yourself at the border and say i have a fear of persecution in my homecountry , you are then , your instead put on a list calling metering list or you have to wait your turn to do that. And so thatstarted in april 2018 and everyone has to go on the meaningless putting mexicans. So theyre trying to flee the country in which their being persecuted and told get on this list, you have to wait along with everybody else and every port of entry is different. Every port of entry handles it in a different way. Theres a different way that is run you in tijuana the weight from the metering list is about six months right now. So thats just to present yourself. And water has its about 2 to 3 months. Some statistics and theres 22,000 people on the metering list. In the various sports. Ive been hearing from mike sass in warez that often they go through 50 names in a day even though only 10 are being let in because so many people are not there. They get on the list and then they either cross you regularly as you would say without inspection or they travel to other parts of mexico. Currently you may have heard about the situation in juarez with mexican asylumseekers being camped out around the two bridges. Theres about 1700, the