No Justice in the Shadows by Alina Das

Author:Alina Das [DAS, ALINA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

PAUL’S STINT IN ICE custody had pretty much ruined his life. His health deteriorated at Varick and worsened at Hudson. After eleven months of imprisonment, he lost his job, the first good job he had held in a long time. It took years for him to get back on track.

We couldn’t let the same thing happen to Aba. Thankfully, in the years since I ran into court to challenge Paul’s imprisonment, more and more courts were adopting similar arguments limiting the government’s authority to hold people without bond. In 2015, my students and I won a case, Lora v. Shanahan, that required the government to provide immigrants with a bond hearing within six months of mandatory detention in the New York region. The decision was short-lived, but over a two-year period it gave hundreds of New Yorkers a shot at a bond hearing.

That, fortunately, included Aba. We used the decision to secure a date for a bond hearing later that fall. The hardest part, though, was preparing her kids. We knew that we needed the judge to see her family in the courtroom. But it meant that they would finally learn the truth—that the US government, their government, had been jailing their mother this whole time.

Aba and Isaac agreed on a way to tell their children, who by this point had caught on more than their parents had realized. The older children wrote heartfelt letters to the judge. The littlest one drew a picture. When we showed Aba their letters, her face was a mix of pride and grief.

We carefully went over her testimony in case the judge wanted to ask her questions, and we had frank conversations about how much she and her husband thought they could pay. “The judge will want to hear a number,” we explained, noting that $10,000 and even $20,000 bonds were routinely given in cases involving criminal convictions. We knew the family couldn’t afford those amounts. We could try to ask for release without bond, but too often we’d seen that strategy backfire, as the judge would set a much higher number than what the person could afford. “I think I could get $3,000 together,” Isaac said. We decided to try that.

The morning of the hearing, Aba’s children stayed home from school. They brushed their teeth, got dressed, and piled into Isaac’s taxi. They arrived at Varick early and gathered in the waiting room, a little breathless. David, the little boy Aba had dropped off at preschool just before she was arrested by ICE, gave me a wide smile and leaned his head on my shoulder as we sat together. Then his smile disappeared. “It’s scary here,” he whispered.

It was scary. I held out my hand. As he grabbed it, I recalled how Aba had clasped my hands when we first met, desperate to get back to her family.

The clerk for our judge poked her head into the waiting room. “355,” she called, announcing the last three digits of Aba’s “Alien number.” We piled into the courtroom.

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