Lowenstein Clinic and ASAP Give Presentation on Family Detention

Liz Leiserson ’17 and Adrienne Lee ’17, two representatives of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, and Liz Willis, the President of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), hosted a presentation for the Yale community on November 3 to explain the human rights implications of family detention – the detention of women and their children – in the United States.

In June 2016, the Lowenstein Clinic published a report entitled “U.S. Detention and Removal of Asylum Seekers” that declared that the United States has violated international law by detaining asylum seekers and deporting them back to their home countries where they risk persecution. Since the release of the report, the Lowenstein Clinic has partnered with ASAP, a law school organization that works to end the summary detention and deportation of refugee women and children.

Liz Leiserson began the discussion by admitting that family detention is technically permissible in the United States but affirming that it can be fought on the grounds of human rights law.

“It might be legal under the Constitution but not international law,” she said.

Leiserson identified two primary reasons for the unlawfulness of family detention: it deters asylum seekers from fleeing to the United States to find refuge, forces them to return to a country where they are subject to persecution, and confines children inside detention centers, which are usually no more than slightly renovated prisons. Suny Rodriguez Alvarado, a community advocate for ASAP, recounted how administrators at the detention center separated her from her son, who was suffering from asthma and tuberculosis.

“We haven’t forgotten the trauma we suffered,” Alvarado said.

Students in the Lowenstein Clinic met with members of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Senate staffers to advocate for changes to U.S. detention policy. Although representatives from each of the departments sympathized with the students’ grievances with family detention, they cited institutional blocks to reform. For instance, the government does not have the infrastructure in place to accept large numbers of refugees.

“We found that there are people who want to help, but the issue is finding out how these improvements can ever be put into practice,” Lee remarked.

Although changing national refugee practices is challenging, progress has already been made. This fall, the United Nations Working Group and DHS’s own Advisory Committee called on the United States to end family detention.