“America’s Toughest Immigration Court”: Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, GA

Christie Thompson at the Marshall Project has published, “America’s Toughest Immigration Court,” which explores the immigration court at the Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, Georgia.  The article reports that at the Stewart Immigration Court has 98 percent of all cases end in deportation, and that from 2007 to 2012, only 6 percent of all detainees have attorneys.  (The average rate of deportation reported is 73.4 percent, by contrast, with New York City’s Immigration Court — where indigent respondents typically receive counsel, funded by the city — showing a low of 30.6 percent).  Lumpkin, GA is about two and a half hours away from Atlanta, and the article describes the difficulties that attorneys have had meeting clients, their frustration with the immigration judges’ high denial rates, and the fact that several of those attorneys have chosen to stop taking cases from that court.

The piece highlights other problems well-known to immigrants rights’ advocates:  the federal government’s ability to transfer detainees out of facilities in which they do have lawyers (at their own cost or from non-profits) and into remote detention centers with far fewer available attorneys; the impact of detention and deportation on families, including families with U.S. citizen children and single parents; and the rise of private prisons in immigration detention (including the recent re-branding of Corporations Correction of America as “CoreCivic”). The legal black hole described in the article is also a product of the current Administration. Many expect that explosions of the same will take place under the incoming one.

-JKoh