Apart from being the UTRGV executive director of College Access Outreach Programs and the mother of three children, Beatriz Becerra-Barckholtz volunteered her time at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley as a Spanish interpreter for immigrants seeking asylum in the United States.
Initially, Becerra-Barckholtz, who is also a board member of the National Center for Farmworker Health, volunteered for the Dilley Pro Bono Project to interpret remotely from outside the center.
“They were looking for Spanish-speaking interpreters who would be able to call in to the center to help people that were on-site, that didn’t speak English,” she said.
However, about two weeks before she started volunteering, Becerra-Barckholtz found an opening available for an on-site interpreter.
“When I heard that that opportunity became available, I really wanted to do it because, although remote interpreting is beneficial, I thought that it would be best to be actually doing it on-site, in person,” she said.
The Dilley Pro Bono Project “organizes volunteer teams for each week,” according to immigrationjustice.us. “DPBP asks volunteers to commit to a Sunday-to-Friday work schedule and to arrive Sunday evening for a mandatory on-the-ground orientation meeting. After an exhilarating week, the team leaves the following Saturday, and a new team arrives to take over the caseload and carry the work forward.”
After requesting vacation for late August and making the necessary arrangements, Becerra-Barckholtz said she headed to spend a whole week in Dilley, a city 72 miles southwest of San Antonio, “to be a Spanish interpreter for attorneys that were coming from other parts of the country to do pro bono work” at the South Texas Family Residential Center, which is a detention center for women and their children operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
She recalled the meticulous process volunteers had to go through every day to enter the facility.
“We would grab bins where we would put all our belongings,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “We had to put all our belongings in a plastic bag and we would put them in the bin and we would have to take off our coats, everything. We had to go through a metal detector. Once we went through the metal detector, we had to turn in our driver’s license or ID in exchange for a badge.”
She and the other volunteers would counsel and advise the women before they would go into their credible fear interviews. Before the Dilley Pro Bono Project existed, the asylum seekers did not have any other type of counseling or preparation for their interviews.
“So, these women would go to these interviews and they would have no idea, no direction, no understanding of what was needed from them to be given asylum here in the U.S.,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “So, with the volunteer work that we did, we helped these immigrants understand what it means to show credible fear to these immigration officers. Credible fear means that they have to show to the immigration officers that there is a reasonable fear that they have as to why they flee their countries.”
During the time she volunteered as an interpreter, the detention center housed about 1,500 to 1,800 immigrants mainly from Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Becerra-Barckholtz worked together with Barbara Clark, another volunteer who was a patent attorney from Ames, Iowa, to help women in the center who did not speak English.
“Barbara and I would team up and she’d say, ‘OK, this is the next person on the list,’” she said. “So, we would call up that name and then the … lady would stand up and then we would walk her to … a small office available because they had like a series of maybe six or eight offices. If those were not available, then we would just take her to a corner of the portable [trailer] and we would start talking to her.”
Becerra-Barckholtz said on some occasions, they had to interview women accompanied by their children, who they would also interview.
“That was very hard to do because we had to pose difficult questions to a 9-year-old who may not necessarily understand what she is doing at a detention center in Dilley, Texas,” she said.
After the counseling session, the clients, which is how the asylum seekers are referred to in the center, have to wait to be called in for their interview with an immigration officer.
“Once they would tell us their story, then we would assess their situation with them and say, ‘OK, when you have your interview with your asylum officer, you are going to have to show … them that there was a real fear for why you were fleeing your country,’” Becerra-Barckholtz said.
She said the asylum seekers received a response from the immigration officer after four to five days after their interview.
“When they would go for their interview, the asylum officer would either give them a positive on their case, meaning that they would be released in the U.S. with an ankle monitor to start the immigration process … here in the U.S.,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “If they got a negative, then they would start the process of being deported back to their countries.”
The percentage of cases approved by ICE in the Dilley detention center has increased due to the assistance from the volunteers, according to Becerra-Barckholtz.
Despite listening to many impactful stories from the women being detained in the facility, the story of a young woman who fled her country due to violence from a drug cartel stays in her memory.
“This young lady … was fleeing because her family owned a piece of land that the cartel wanted to take over to use to grow their drugs,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “So, when the cartel went and was asking them, ‘Well, you need to give us your land, we’re going to take over your land,’ they were refusing to do it. So then, from that transpired that the cartel kidnapped one of the family members for extortion, so, ‘You give us the land, we’ll give you your family member.’ Well, two days later they got news that they had killed the family member, [who] was the young lady’s brother.”
The majority of women in the South Texas Family Residential Center emigrated from their countries due to gang and domestic violence, according to the stories she heard from immigrant women at the center.
As the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents, Becerra-Barckholtz feels the need to help and hopes to volunteer again next year.
“If my family was trying to enter the U.S. during the times that we are living now, I would’ve wanted somebody to help my parents understand the process,” she said.
Asked how she would describe her experience, Becerra-Barckholtz replied, “It was an amazing experience. I think people can really gain an understanding of our immigration system in the U.S. … It’s taken me a couple of months to understand what that experience meant for me because it was really interesting. … I feel like my experience was a deep dive into a place at the heart of the national immigration situation that we are currently in right now.
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