The Ashland Center for Non-violence invited Brian Hoffman, an attorney specializing in immigration, to discuss America’s Refugee Crisis with students and community.

Hoffman is the lead attorney with the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, which is an organization conformed by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services to name some of them. All of these institutions have combined their efforts to fight against the family detention centers in the United States and also give representation and assistance to these families.

Family detention centers are holding facilities where immigrant families, including children and babies, are detained until their court dates. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center these facilities were built to quickly deport people and deter future migrants.

The immigration debate in the United States is one of the most controversial topics today. People are thrown all kinds of irrelevant and incorrect information that clouds the reality of these issues, particularly the lack of awareness surrounding family detention centers.

“It was really eye opening, said Emily Wirtz, an AU student, “I think it is really important to understand this kind of issues specially right now with the election coming now.”

The practice of family detention centers started in 1942 during the World War II. Then in 2009, the Obama administration announced the closing of T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., However, after seeing that more immigrants were seeking  asylum in the United States in 2014, decided to restart the mass detention of immigrant families.

Hoffman spent more than 6 months in the Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, one of the biggest family detention centers in the United States. He was a firsthand observer of the conditions and the unjust treatment that these families received.

Hoffman mentions how there have been medical errors in the facility with no repercussions for the medical staff. Education is provided for children, but all of it is in Spanish, despite the native dialects spoken by many of the migrants. Finally, refugees need to pay for their attorneys or look for pro bono lawyers who are willing to take their cases. Most of these families come from low income homes, meaning that the probability of them paying for an attorney is low.

Hoffman said that winning these immigration cases without an attorney is nearly impossible.

“Most people lose their case, but not because their situation don’t merit asylum, it is because they don’t have the adequate representation, maybe because they don’t have the ability to transport themselves to court,” said Hoffman. “They don’t have the access to the experts and medical professionals that you would use if you are going to do a criminal trial.”

Most of Hoffman`s clients have been families from Central America, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. He mentions that he often represents families who have run away from their countries because of life threating situations.

“The right under the international law to seek asylum is meaningless if the deck is so stacked against you from the very beginning and that you don’t have an actual chance of ever winning your case,” Hoffman said. “and that is what happens to most of these people.”

In 2013, Honduras was named the “World’s Murder Capital,” with a murder rate of 85.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2012. That number has dropped to 66 per 100,000 people, compared to the United States rate of 5.1 homicides per 100,000 people. El Salvador is among the top five countries of highest homicide rates per year.

According to Hoffman many of the people who are deported to their countries are often killed.

“What we know from published accounts and from the countries a condition report published by many non-governmental organizations is that people who get departed to Central America often don’t survive,” said Hoffman.

Hoffman mentions that many of his clients run away from gang violence and the consequences of a corrupt governmental system.

The United States is a part of the Refugee Convention, where the U.S.A is compelled to give asylum to anybody who falls into the definition of refugee.

The system is failing to give these families their right to be safe.

Nancy Udolph, professor of social work at AU, sees this situation as a worrying and unacceptable.

“It is definitely a human rights violation,” said Udolph. “We are assigned to the UN declaration of human rights and we are signed for the Refugee Convention and as a nation we should fallow it.”

Having these family detentions centers is not only going against human rights and taking lives, but also is a very lucrative business for jail companies. On top of that, tax payer money goes into maintaining the lives of the women and children who are living there. These detention centers are often operated by for-profit, private prison companies; in this case Dilley is managed by Correction Corporation America, the biggest prison company in the country. According to the Detention Watch Network, CCA earned $1.67 billion in revenue in 2009.