Operation Streamline Part One

Dear friends,

This is something I have been wanting to write about for so long but kept putting off. It is without a doubt the hardest part of my job. Not balancing planning and organizing delegations with staying on top of immigration news, getting out BorderLinks' monthly email in a timely fashion, driving a 15-passenger van, or looking to native Spanish speakers for help with simultaneous interpretation when an animated maquiladora worker excitedly tells a five-minute long story about organizing a union in the factory without pausing to breathe and wanting to get every last detail communicated in English. (Respira, respira - breathe, breathe).

I love my work, and I love that every day is different. I love that I get to learn and experience and be challenged by so many different things and help make it possible for others to do that as well. But I'd rather not experience this. I'd rather them not experience this. But as long as it goes on, we have to because we have to end it.

This is the hardest part because it is emotionally hard. And I will have to do it, have my heart broken, endure, and endure, and endure countless times throughout the year with every delegation I lead. 

I have been a witness to Operation Streamline four times. I have been once as an assistant delegation leader as a part of my BorderLinks training, once on our YAV border delegation with YAVs from Tucson, Austin, and Denver, and I have since been twice as a part of my own delegations that I am leading. There are times to be objective, systematic, and academic, but in these cases I do not want to be cold. I do not want to become calloused. I don't want it to stop bothering me.

I started writing about Operation Streamline in my previous blog post, Immigration 101. The basic gist that I wrote is this: "The government's intent was to make it so hard for people to cross that they wouldn't try anymore, but since people are still coming. In [2005 in Del Rio, Texas] they started criminalizing immigration violations and detaining people for months instead of simply deporting them. This program called Operation Streamline exists in several cities, and at least in the Tucson sector, 70 people are arbitrarily chosen to get streamlined and criminally processed every single day within a span of a half hour to 1.5 hours. Sentences range from 30 days to 6 months in detention."

The following is more of my take, but if you'd like to see a video rundown en ingles y español, click here: Operation Streamline: The Mass Incarceration of Migrants. Or if you're more of an academic journal person, try this: 2010 Review of Operation Streamline 

With BorderLinks, our typical delegation framework when we take groups to Streamline (which happens every day Monday to Friday, 1:30pm to whenever it's done, in the specially built special proceedings room) is that we have lunch at BorderLinks and head out around 1pm, stay however long it takes, do a short debrief, and then talk with a public defense lawyer who will help answer all the technical legal questions. Therefore, my writing about Streamline is grounded in four times witnessing, four times conversing with public defenders, and four times feeling confused and helpless.

This special proceeding is open to the public, as long as everyone fits in the seven to eight pews in the rightmost section of the room. No cameras are allowed into the federal courthouse building, and technology that can be brought into the courtroom must be turned off. So we have no record, or at least I don't (some people out there I'm sure have sneakily taken photos or recorded on their smartphones), about the spectacle of, to generalize, 70 brown people shackled at their hands, waist, and ankles, guarded and represented by majority pale people, in what is the most elegant room perhaps the majority of the defendants have ever set foot in.

The original idea was to create a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal immigration and to process every illegal entry criminally instead of just civilly by way of immigration enforcement (aka just deporting someone right across the border or back to their country of origin). If it were truly zero-tolerance, the estimates are that 600-700 people would have to be processed criminally per day. Instead, the Tucson sector only has the infrastructure to process 70, so it is effectively about a 90-percent-tolerance policy.
 
With the courts already backlogged, how do we stick a whole bunch of people with the same criminal charge in a lot less time than it takes to process each individual case through a trial? Streamline.  
Defendants are effectively signing a deal to plead guilty to a misdemeanor of illegal entry, and the federal government will waive the charge of felony illegal re-entry. Then, based on number of prior deportations and if there are other crimes associated with illegal entry defendants are given sentences between the parameters of 30 and 180 days, with time already served in detention credited towards their sentence, thank goodness. However, because it is an en masse hearing, judges do not say out loud in court the reasoning for each individual's sentence length, which leaves us witnesses speculating. 

An additional factor in the confusion is that in Tucson there are seven or eight magistrates who sit on the bench for Streamline, and every time I go for the next few times I could see a new judge. And because there is so much judicial variation, in how the Streamline process is carried out, I should probably do a better job of bring a notepad into the courtroom instead of almost completely covering the back of my hand with all the differences I noticed like I did during my most recent Harvard Divinity delegation.

The part of the court proceedings the public does not get to see is the time where defendants meet with their lawyers earlier in the day. Thanks to Gideon v. Wainwright, every defendant in a criminal case that cannot afford a lawyer will be appointed one, so everyone is assigned either a public defender, or, because the federal public defenders office's budget has been slashed, a contract lawyer working for about $110/hour. Each lawyer in Streamline for the day will receive 4-5 cases and a limited time to meet with all of them, so each defendant ends up with about 20-40 minutes with their lawyer to explain the terms of their case, their rights, and the plea deal, as well as look for any possible defense to take the case to trial or make an asylum claim.
 
At least the system recognizes the vast majority of the defendants in Streamline are Spanish speakers, and therefore there is a court interpreter and lawyers have to be bilingual in English and Spanish. Many of the lawyers themselves are Latin@, but as someone with a college degree in the U.S., legalese is still wonderfully complicated in my primary language. Think defendants understand what their rights are and what they are agreeing to with one or even two language barriers if their primary tongue is neither English nor Spanish but perhaps an indigenous language? If it is determined that a defendant is not at a level of understanding due to mental competency or language barrier, the case is often either given more time or thrown out.



A few more of the basics based on what I have seen and been told:
- Border Patrol has a lot of discretion over who out of the 600-700 daily illegal entries gets streamlined.
- Most Streamline cases are processed within a week of when a person was picked up by Border Patrol.
- When we the public see them, defendants are seated in the courtroom in the clothes in which they were arrested. 
- Out of the 70, usually 2-5 of them are women. The rest are men, some of whom look as young as 14, and some of whom could be in their sixties. To be processed in Streamline you are supposed to be a legal adult, but sometimes minors say they are 18+ so they are processed with a family member of the same gender. Minors are sent to different facilities, as are males and females.
- Every defendant is shackled at three points: their hands, around their waist, and between their ankles, allowing for only short strides. I've heard different rationale for this from different people, one saying that every federal criminal defendant in that building is shackled. Another said that only when the defendants outnumber the court marshals is everyone shackled, for safety reasons, of course.
- The judge addresses all of the defendants at once to read the charges and make sure the defendants understand their rights. Every judge does this differently, and with different speed and intentionality in their voice. 
- Groups of five to seven come up to the front to stand at microphones with their lawyers. They are then questioned individually these days, with different groupings of questions depending on the judge.
- In hearing judges read off, "Mr./Ms. ______, are you a citizen of _____ and did you enter the United States on ________ away from an area or time designated by U.S. immigration authorities?" (or some variation of this), you usually learn where people are from. Mexico has the largest representation, unsurprisingly, but other typical homelands are El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
- Normally all you hear an individual say is "si," "no," and "culpable" (guilty). And then they are led away.



I have personally seen it take 33 minutes to process 70 defendants. 33 minutes. And I have seen it take around two hours. Has justice been served here? 

One public defendant we have met with said first thing, "So, you are all shocked and appalled at witnessing brown people being shackled who are economic refugees." From there, we processed more of what we saw and heard, and contextualized it within economic systems and the private prison industry booming as a result of the criminalization of economic refugees.
  


This is when I struggle the most between being professional as a delegation leader and experiencing right along with my participants. There is delicacy required to impartially (as impartially as possible) opening a space for others to experience and form their own conclusions, contributing your knowledge without tainting their organic takeaways or guiding them to what you want them to get out of it, and sharing your own reactions to grow with your group.
 
My first Streamline experience was unfortunately an excellent trial run for professionalism vs. being human. I was as an assistant delegation leader with Alex's group from Phillips Theological Seminary. I had spent some time with them the couple of days prior, so we had some foundation for relationship-building. I sat in the front row next to a participant, a forty-something year-old woman with whom I had shared some decent conversation. I'm pretty sure she had also been one of these forty- to eighty-year-olds on this delegation who had given advice to me, this 23-year-old, as parents would. 

Sitting in the front row on the right side of the courtroom, we were the last thing defendants saw before they disappeared through the side door to await their return to detention. Most were led to the door with their lawyers and stopped to thank them, once in a while glancing over at the peanut gallery. 

But one man, probably in his thirties, in his last moments in the courtroom, paused and turned around just before passing through the door. He looked each one of us in the front row in the eye, and just nodded.

I took that as to mean he intended to thank us for being there, and I just cried. I hate crying, and for much of my life, I haven't. But this, I couldn't take it.

I've learned it takes something to be vulnerable with other people; to share yourself with other people. I'm still not good at it, but I don't know if anyone really ever is. 

Outside the courtroom afterwards, I had the opportunity to walk with her as the group migrated to the public defenders office, and I apologized for crying. She refused to accept my apology, and instead told me that it was powerful for me as a leader to experience that with them, and to acknowledge my own humanity. And that is why I say as I have to bring groups, and bring myself, to Streamline time in and time out, I don't want it to stop bothering me.

The first time, I remember feeling like it was a zoo. That, to be very blunt, we were a bunch of white people watching brown people led around in chains. As other people I have connected with through BorderLinks have said, it is just another facet of the criminalization of dark-skinned and indigenous people. And as my delegation co-leader from HEPAC, MaryCruz, says, "History does not repeat itself. We repeat history." We have choice in the matter. But we continue to tell people their way of life isn't valid, and whomever does not fit into our framework is cast aside and/or criminalized. And we silence them.



Voice.
To me, the most important piece of Streamline is voice. The voices that drown when you have an en masse hearing for 70 people. The voice that fill the courtroom versus the Spanish interpretation that flows only to the headsets of defendants who need them. The power of the voices of different judges as they vary in their approach from "Get me the heck out of here" and throwing three questions mumbled in succession at each individual, to "I really want to make sure that you understand your rights and that you know what you are agreeing to," to "Do you have anything you would like to say?"

Typically, even when a judge asks, "Do you have anything to say?", the answer is "No." However, it does happen that there is a precedent set by one person who speaks up, and then others follow suit. My first time at Streamline, a man in the very last group spoke up and said, "I just want to say that even though we came here illegally, no human being is illegal, and I just wanted you to know that." The judge could have ignored his comment or replied in any number of ways, but she said, "Thank you for saying that, and I'm sorry." I feel it was such a tragedy for only four other defendants to hear his message. What power that would have carried for the other 65.

Last time, near the last few groups, three out of five spoke up and shared their reasons for coming into this country without the requisite documents. One talked of his sick mother in Mexico that he had to send money back to. Another talked of reuniting with his son in the United States. And then a third said he needed to find work in the states to support his wife and three children back in Mexico.

The judge this time took it upon herself to tell each of them variations of this message: "I understand things are hard, but your family needs you to be safe and working back in Mexico. I know you want to do what is best for your family, but what is best is for you to be with them."

Clearly she was giving them the best advice she could think of. But first, that doesn't address the issue of separation from family in the U.S. And two, that demonstrates a lack of understanding on her part about the economic situation back home. That if there were work back home that paid enough to take care of their families, they would not have risked their lives to come here.

One man from Mexico was not wearing the earphones for interpretation, instead going through the entire court proceeding in English, signifying he had either practiced a lot of English in Mexico, or he had been in the U.S. a long time and was immersed. He used his voice in a way very powerful for us, which was not in front of the entire court, but when he reached the audience before going through the door, he said to us in perfect English, "Have a good day." Ay, mi corazon, my heart.

In my four times at Streamline, I've only seen one case thrown out because of a language barrier. Typically that would happen in the morning before the public proceeding, but this young man was just 18 years old, his first language was one I had never heard of, and when it was his turn at the front, his lawyer just noted to the court that they had some problems with understanding and asked for more time at the end. The lawyer claimed that they could go through the court proceeding because even though it was clearly evident that he did not understand everything that was being said, he had up to 8th grade education in Spanish and understood alright when it was written. The judge did a verbal evaluation with them after everyone else had left the courtroom, and she in agreement with, surprisingly, the prosecutor, advocated the case be thrown out.

This transpired under a female judge who spoke deliberately slowly and clearly and asked many times throughout the process for the defendants to confirm understanding or raise questions if they had any. She is the only one I heard ask if anyone wanted more time with their lawyer, and one defendant actually took her up on that, standing up and receiving a sidebar with his lawyer while the first group of five processed to the front for questioning. How would defendants know they have a right to and deserve more time with their representation?

And how do you listen to 70 people saying "culpable," "guilty," when they hang their heads to confirm they crossed the border without the permission of the mighty United States?

When it is in fact the responsibility of the mighty United States to prove they performed the action of crossing the border without permission at the specified time and place, like the prosecution asserts?

When they perhaps have a claim to asylum or derivative citizenship or another defense, but just didn't have enough time with their lawyers?

When if every single Streamline defendant chose to take their individual case to trial, it would overwhelm the system and who knows what would happen? 

But do you encourage defendants to do that when they resign themselves to being culpable and just want to get this over with so they can serve their time and get out of detention as soon as possible, rather than waste in detention waiting for a trial for an indefinite period of time?

When they know they could get out in 30 days, or 85 days, or 160 days to try to find work to feed their families? 

How do you bear witness to this? I have no good answer, and that is the struggle.


Further rhetorical questions:
What does it mean to be a witness? Do your best to acknowledge the humanity of others? How do you do that? Share someone's pain for that split second of eye contact? Share their joy that this process is over, or that they got a shorter sentence than it could have been? How in the world do you communicate numbness, anger, hurt, frustration, helplessness, etc. in a single glance?

There is no justice served here, in my opinion. This is when I feel most helpless in my job. But people in Tucson are doing something about it, from BorderLinks where we feel nearly every delegation should witness Streamline, to the End Streamline Coalition, which has more action-driven intentions - including a letter campaign to all lawyers and judges to demand them to recuse themselves from participating in Streamline, so as to jam the cogs in the machine.

And on October 11th (goodness, this was a long time ago!), people chained themselves to the federal courthouse gates and around two buses to prevent Operation Streamline prosecution and deportation proceedings, and they succeeded! "According to multiple sources, as a result of the three and a half hour long and continuing peaceful blockade, the court, for one of the only times in it’s history, cancelled the proceedings where detainees are presented in shackles in front of a judge and sentenced as a group" -  Tucson Blocking Deportation Buses

“'Anyone who witnesses Operation Streamline will come away convinced that it is both unconstitutional and immoral,' explains writer and author, Roberto Cintli Rodriguez. 'There is no justice in that courtroom. It violates every principle the US claims to ascribe to.  When humanity is confronted with unjust laws, it is our responsibility to challenge them.'” I have since met this author, who happens to be a professor at the University of Arizona, on several occasions because he is so active in the community, and I am amazed by how he shows up for different organizations working for immigration justice on top of his work in the classrooms about reinvisioning the colonial Americas and patterns of migration. And he makes the time to get to Streamline regularly to continue to be present, to continue to be a witness, just as we do.

If you're feeling overloaded already, just think I was about to make this blog post about three times as long! Instead, I decided to focus on the initial Streamline experiences and heart-mode in this post. In the next installment of Kathryn Witnesses Operation Streamline, I'll take the corporeal to the streets and dive into the intellectual/philosophical realms with some political theory and civil disobedience.

Hasta pronto,
Kathryn