Welcoming the Stranger at Our Border
A Conversation with Linda Dakin-Grimm
Linda Dakin-Grimm is Senior Consulting Partner at Milbank LLP, where she handled numerous jury and bench trials, appeals, and arbitration proceedings in courts across the United States. Ms. Dakin-Grimm now concentrates on pro bono immigration matters. She has taken on more than 75 unaccompanied children, separated families and others in immigration proceedings and regularly acts as lead counsel in challenges to immigration policy in federal courts. Her book, Dignity and Justice: Welcoming the Stranger at our Border, was published by Orbis Press in September 2020. She was a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow in 2020 and a Senior Fellow in 2021.
Ms. Dakin-Grimm is a Trustee of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and a member of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Advisory Board, the L.A. Advisory Board of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), and the Southern California Catholic Task Force on Immigration. Ms. Dakin-Grimm speaks widely and has been quoted on immigration matters in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, L.A. Opinion, Law360, Buzzfeed News, America Magazine, and many other publications.
Julie Allen: Linda, in your book, Dignity and Justice: Welcoming the Stranger at Our Border, you explore the issue of migration to the southern border of the United States and its historical, social, legal, and political dynamics. You also encourage a Catholic response to the situation. Can you explain what you mean by that and speak about how your faith influences your work for justice?
Linda Dakin-Grimm: I do come to the issue of migration from the perspective of my Catholic faith tradition. The Hebrew Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and the long-standing teachings of the Catholic Church are consistent and unambiguous: we are repeatedly told to welcome the stranger. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that he will not recognize those who do not do this. There is simply no room for “me or my country first” in the Bible. Today, Jesus's teaching about the dignity and importance of every person stirs me deeply. It motivates my work.
That said, for much of my life, I paid very little attention to migrants or the issue of who migrates and why. As a lawyer for more than 30 years, I represented financial institutions and corporations of one sort or another in disputes against similar parties. I made a nice living. I live in a safe Southern California beach town. I never had to run from a life-and-death situation or consider emigrating. I felt no hostility toward migrants, but in truth, I rarely thought about migrants at all. Notwithstanding my own faith tradition, I just did not pay attention.
That started to change in about 2013, when two things happened. In my early 50s, I started a master’s program in theology at Loyola Marymount University, in an effort to better understand my own faith. And around the same time, I started to work with unaccompanied minor children who were then arriving at the southern U.S. border in large numbers. I took on one child's immigration case on a pro bono basis. That case led to dozens more. At the end of 2015, I gave up my business law practice to represent unaccompanied children full time. Over the next few years, my focus expanded to include other kinds of immigrant cases including separated families and deported veterans. During the Trump administration, I began partnering with various NGOs to sue the federal government when it violated the law.
Allen: Linda, before we turn to your most recent asylum case involving the Arredondo family, would you briefly explain for those of us who are not immigration lawyers, what is required to obtain asylum in the U.S.?
Dakin-Grimm: Most people assume that the U.S. grants “asylum” to anyone who can show that they fled real danger or difficulty in their home country. But that is simply not true. Asylum is available only to a narrow subset of those fleeing danger or difficulty. To be granted asylum, one must prove:
(1) they suffered past serious persecution or have a credible fear of future persecution in their home country, where
(2) their country’s government could not or would not protect them.
But that is not all. They must also prove that
(3) the reason for their persecution falls into one of five protected categories. The applicant has to prove that the persecution they experienced is “on account of” their race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a social group.
Asylum applicants who have not experienced “persecution” (but have suffered in other ways), and those who have experienced persecution that is not because of one of these five categories cannot obtain asylum.
(4) Finally, the applicant must prove that they cannot simply relocate within their own country and live safely.
In my experience, most people who come to the U.S. to ask for asylum are in terrible straits and are fleeing something awful. But they do not understand what it takes to obtain asylum. They are often shocked to learn that “my village is terribly dangerous,” or “my country is in the midst of a civil war,” or “we are so poor we are starving” are not reasons that usually result in a grant of asylum.
Allen: Immigration reform is a perennial cry from both sides of the political aisle. Do you see hope for progress on that front?
Dakin-Grimm: It is quite common to hear people characterize the immigration system as “broken.” It is much less common to find people who understand what the law and system actually are. I have found that people with the strongest opinions on immigration often have the least factually grounded understanding of the law and system. I would characterize the current status as a stalemate. Immigration law is in desperate need of updating and reform, but the need has been stymied by wildly successful disinformation campaigns by some on the right. Resistance to change usually comes from those who are afraid and from those who benefit from the status quo. On the other hand, those seeking to reform the law and system to be more open sometimes make unrealistic demands and they tend to be balkanized into sub-groups (for example, those who support Dreamers or those seeking to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for a particular country) without considering the needs of others in the system or the system as a whole.
The voting public, having no real understanding of the exceptionally varied and complicated situations that drive migration today, sometimes succumb to fear or just look away (as I did for many years). Many have been misled and confused by disinformation campaigns, which have relied on stoking fear of the “other,” threats of “losing what we have,” and a kind of Christian Nationalism that is un-American and unrelated to Jesus of Scripture.
Immigration law is federal – it can only be changed by Congress, not by the President or by individual states and their attention-seeking governors. I do not see Congress reforming the law and system in a meaningful way in the near term. Congress itself has been broken by the hyper-partisan reality-show mentality that became normalized in the Trump years. Until we find a way to correct the massive disinformation about immigration that predictably roils voters, it is unlikely that Congress will move on immigration reform at all.
During the Trump years, that administration rather quickly learned that the President could not change the law by fiat, so they began to disregard it. During that period, immigration advocates spent much time and resources suing the administration to force it to follow the law as it was. The Trump side almost always lost. But that wasn’t reform – that was simply trying to maintain a legitimate system of law.
In the Biden era, reform is going on. But it is not the major systemic reform of the law that many hoped for and which is so badly needed. The reform is internal and somewhat “behind the curtain” reform by the agencies that enforce the law, including the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In hundreds of ways, each of those agencies is being reformed behind the scenes. Those of us practicing in the field see the results in ways that benefit individuals applying for benefits and statuses. This is not to say that there is no resistance within the agencies. Whether the internal reform will be lasting if there is a new administration in 2024 remains to be seen.
Allen: Turning to the Arredondo family, how did they come to be seeking asylum in the U.S. from Guatemala?
Dakin-Grimm: The Arredondo family was a family of six, who lived in the Peronia section of Villa Nueva, Guatemala. Villa Nueva, a city of about 1.5 million people, is the second largest city in Guatemala. In 2017, the father, Fernando, and his then-17-year-old son, Marco, joined a neighborhood watch group in Peronia, hoping to keep their village safe from gangs. What they did not understand was the group's origin and the ulterior purpose of its creators. When those behind the group's formation, which (unbeknownst to the family) included a mayoral candidate, members of the National Police, and criminals, erroneously came to believe that Fernando opposed them, Marco was murdered by gunmen while sitting with his sister on their grandmother's front porch. The police did nothing to investigate the murder and the family was subsequently stalked, threatened at gunpoint, and otherwise terrorized as they moved around within Guatemala trying to find safety. In 2018, the family decided to flee to the U.S. to ask for asylum.Describing his feelings about the murder of his son and the family's flight, Fernando said, “I felt a mix of rage, anger, and helplessness.” Fernando described feeling both fear and despair in this difficult time, but said, “I had to be strong and support my family.”
Allen: I understand the family was separated at the border when they crossed seeking asylum in 2018. What happened and how did you become involved with their case?
Dakin-Grimm: The family traveled together north through Guatemala and Mexico on buses. One strategy the U.S. has long used to staunch the flow of migrants from the south is to put pressure on Mexico to intercept migrants and turn them back before they reach the U.S. border. Fernando and his then-12-year-old daughter, Andrea, were pulled off a bus in Mexico and held for several days by police without charges. Mrs. Arredondo, Cleivi, and her two other daughters were allowed to continue to the U.S. border. The first separation the family experienced was at the hands of Mexican authorities.
Cleivi and her two daughters lawfully asked for asylum at an official border crossing in Laredo, Texas in early May 2018. Cleivi passed a “credible fear” interview and the three were eventually allowed to go to Los Angeles, California to stay with a relative while they pursued their asylum case in immigration court.
After a few days in Mexican detention, Fernando and Andrea were released. On May 16, 2018, they went to the same official border crossing as had Cleivi and the girls. Their treatment could not have been more different. They were immediately detained in a cell with about 25 other people. Andrea was forcibly torn from Fernando crying and shaking. She was marched off with a group of other children and put on a bus, while Fernando and the other parents strained to watch them out of the single window in the cell. CBP agents refused to answer questions about where the children were being taken. Andrea was not told where she was going or whether she would ever see her father again. Describing his feelings at that time, Fernando said, “I felt helpless. I was in a strange and hostile place and there was obviously nothing else I could do to protect my daughter. I was scared and angry, but I was completely powerless.”
The next day, Fernando was moved in hand cuffs and leg chains to Rio Grande Detention Center, a privately owned, for-profit prison run by the GEO Group. He was never advised of any charges against him, nor was he told where his daughter had been taken.
In early June 2018, Fernando was transported in chains to the infamous Stewart Detention Center in Lumkin, Georgia, more than 1,000 miles away. He was given no explanation for the transfer. Stewart is a for-profit prison run by CoreCivic. Fernando became seriously ill at Stewart, suffering severe headaches and running a high fever. His hair fell out and he was covered with hives. He lost eight pounds during the first two weeks of his incarceration there. He became increasingly unwell psychologically, but no medical treatment was offered. Rumors about consequences for seeking medical treatment discouraged Fernando from asking for help.
In mid-June 2018, Fernando was moved again in chains to Folkston Immigration Processing Center, another GEO for-profit prison in Georgia, about 200 miles from Stewart.
Following growing press attention, DHS publicly acknowledged on June 15, 2018 that it had separated approximately 2,000 children from their parents or legal guardians between April 19 and May 31, 2018. (The true numbers have turned out to be much larger.)
Fernando was inexplicably taken from Folkston back to Stewart in early June 2018, once again in chains. An ICE agent visited Fernando in his cell at Stewart and told him he had failed a “credible fear” interview at Folkston, that he did not qualify for asylum, and that it would be a waste of time for him to ask to see an immigration judge because “immigration judges always defer to ICE's decisions.” The agent told Fernando that his case was “personal” to ICE and that the U.S. is “not interested in people like him.”
On June 23, 2018, Andrea was released from the juvenile detention facility in Texas where she had been held and was sent to live with her mother in Los Angeles, California.
On June 26, 2018, at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a case called Ms. L v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), 310 F.Supp.3d 1133 (S.D. Cal. 2018), U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw granted a nationwide injunction against the Trump administration's family separation policy. The injunction specifically prohibited ICE from deporting parents like Fernando who were in custody after having been separated from their children.
On August 3, 2018, Judge Sabraw ordered ICE to find and reunite all children with the parents from whom they had been taken. ICE had resisted this order and admitted that they had not kept track of the parents and children, as there had been no intention of reunification. Instead of reuniting Fernando with Andrea, and in violation of the federal court injunction, on August 22, 2018, ICE deported Fernando to Guatemala. He began living on the run, moving from place to place, and doing temporary jobs in an effort to avoid detection by the state-criminal network.
Allen: Linda, can you share the key milestones in the case between 2018, when Fernando Arredondo was deported to Guatemala, and the family’s ultimate reunification upon his return to the U.S. in 2020?
Dakin-Grimm: In early September 2018, at the request of the non-profit agency, Kids in Need of Defense (“KIND”), I became counsel to Cleivi and her three daughters, Keyli, Andrea, and Alison. I filed their asylum applications in Immigration Court in Los Angeles. But the family was falling apart without Fernando, who has always been the family's breadwinner and emotional core. Andrea was depressed and angry at what had happened to her. Moreover, under another Trump administration policy (since revoked), Cleivi was not eligible even to apply for permission to work until her asylum application had been pending for one year, so the family was destitute. They received assistance from local families and institutions, including Temple Israel of Hollywood (where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “arc of the moral universe” speech in 1965) and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it became obvious that mother and daughters would not survive without Fernando. But there did not seem to be a way for him to come back.
On September 12, 2018, the ACLU and ICE announced a proposed settlement of the family separation issues in the Ms. L case. For parents like Fernando, who had already been deported, the settlement agreement said only that the government would “consider” permitting the deported parents to return to the U.S. in “rare and unusual” circumstances. That tiny window gave the family some hope.
In October 2018, I reached out to the ACLU, and began appearing at hearings in the Ms. L case in San Diego. I lobbied the ACLU to apply to have Fernando returned to the U.S. to pursue asylum with his family under the “rare and unusual” provision of the Ms. L. Settlement Agreement. Fernando provided sworn testimony about what had been done to him and how it had affected him deeply. ICE eventually responded to the ACLU that Fernando and Andrea had not been considered (or counted) as a “separated family” and that ICE did not consider them to be eligible for relief under the Settlement Agreement. The ACLU agreed that this position was ridiculous. I worked with them to bring the issue to Judge Sabraw.
In March 2019, Judge Sabraw ruled that Fernando and Andrea (and others like them) absolutely qualified as “separated families” under the Settlement Agreement. He ordered ICE to comply with the Settlement Agreement by considering Fernando for return under the “rare and unusual” provision. ICE purported to comply, but concluded that “upon consideration,” none of the separated and deported parents had experienced anything “rare or unusual” that would justify a return.
One of the DOJ lawyers for ICE recommended that deported parents like Fernando go through the onerous process of applying to ICE for “humanitarian parole.” Though this did not make sense because humanitarian parole is for short visits (for example, accompanying a relative through a medical procedure), I applied for humanitarian parole for Fernando, obtaining supportive declarations from a rabbi from Temple Israel of Hollywood and a bishop from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. ICE rejected the application without explanation.
Working with the ACLU, we made another motion to the Court, asking for an order that ICE allow Fernando and 21 other deported parents to return to the U.S. The 22 parents had been identified by the ACLU as truly “rare and unusual” from among the thousands of parents ICE had torn from their children and deported. Considering this motion, on July 12, 2019, Judge Sabraw ordered ICE to produce all the evidence on which it had based the deportations of the 22 parents. ICE produced no evidence on Fernando other than a document listing his biographical information and the date of his deportation.
On September 4, 2019, Judge Sabraw ordered ICE to allow Fernando and 10 of the other 21 parents to return to the U.S. Judge Sabraw specifically ruled that ICE's deportation of Fernando was unlawful, as it had been done after Judge Sabraw had expressly ordered the government to cease deportations of parents who had been separated from their children.
In a required report ICE submitted to Judge Sabraw on October 24, 2019, ICE admitted to having separated 1,566 more children from their parents during 2017 and 2018 that they had not previously counted (just like they had not counted Fernando and Andrea). The majority of these children were age 12 or under. More than 200 of them were under 5 years old.
Notwithstanding Judge Sabraw's order, ICE stalled and refused to allow Fernando and the others to return during 2019.
On January 22, 2020, ICE finally allowed Fernando and nine other adults to return to the U.S. on a commercial flight from Guatemala City to Los Angeles, California at their own expense. I accompanied Fernando with a priest and a rabbi from Los Angeles who had long supported the family's case. Fernando and the others were welcomed at LAX by the national and local press and a U.S. Congressman. Fernando and the family were later welcomed at a reception by Eric Garcetti, then-Mayor of Los Angeles.
Allen: I understand that one of our fellow ALI 2020 cohort members played a role in the outcome of the case.
Dakin-Grimm: I started my Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellowship in Cambridge at the beginning of January 2020. There, I met Edwin Escobar, another 2020 ALI Fellow, who had been the Mayor of Villa Nueva, Guatemala from 2012 to 2019. The coincidence of our participation in ALI at the same time has had an enormous life-changing impact on the Arredondo family.
Fernando returned to the U.S. in January 2020 to reunite with his family, which was a source of great joy. But if he and the family could not qualify for asylum, they would all have to return to Guatemala. Qualifying for asylum, as I mentioned above, is quite difficult. At Harvard, I asked Edwin if he had any knowledge or information that could help his former constituents' case. Astonishingly, he did, and he was willing to investigate the case with his former staff in Villa Nueva and provide testimony under oath to support the case.
Between February and June 2020, Escobar worked with Prof. Anthony Fontes of American University, an expert on Central American corruption, violence, and police misconduct whom I had hired for the case. Escobar and Fontes spoke with a number of Escobar's former mayoral staff members, who confirmed that Escobar's successor, Javier Gramajo, and his criminal and national police supporters had created the neighborhood watches that Fernando and Marco had joined, not to keep the neighborhood safe (as Fernando and Marco had understood), but to control voting in the 2019 mayoral election in Peronia. These were the men who believed that Fernando was their opponent and had Marco killed.
Javier Gramajo and the state-criminal network working with him, focused heavily on locking up votes in the Peronia region of Villa Nueva – where the Arredondos had lived. Gramajo's deputy, Frank Miranda, had spread the word that gangs were intent on taking over the neighborhoods, and used local neighborhood watches to keep outsiders out. By excluding outsiders, Miranda worked with his gang affiliated brother “Tortuga” to force residents of Peronia to vote for Gramajo. Gramajo won the mayoral election in Villa Nueva on this basis by a narrow margin attributable to the votes in Peronia.
Working with his former staff, Escobar offered testimony about Gramajo's strategy and tactics to get elected Mayor of Villa Nueva. Following his win, Gramajo appointed Frank Miranda Deputy Mayor of Peronia. Miranda and his brother began extorting businesses in Peronia. They control bus lines and taxi services. The extortion payments are shared among the state-criminal network members, including the head of the Policia Nacional Civil in Peronia. Escobar's participation in the Arredondos' case was at great danger to himself – particularly since he and his family have continued to live in Guatemala after his Harvard ALI program ended.
In July 2020, Escobar provided sworn, written testimony that Fernando's neighborhood watch activity and his insistence that his son's murder be investigated, which Fernando had believed was in pursuit of justice, had made him a target of the state-criminal network that got Mr. Gramajo elected mayor. Escobar testified that Gramajo and his deputy, Frank Miranda, believed that Fernando knew too much about the illegal events in Peronia that led up to the 2019 mayoral election. Escobar's testimony stated that the threat of death to the Arredondo family is real and was due to their activity in this political arena.
The July 2020 hearing on the Arredondo family's asylum claim was canceled due to the COVID pandemic. It ultimately occurred on October 7, 2022. In the meantime, and quite shockingly, on March 7, 2022, Peronia Deputy Mayor Frank Miranda murdered an officer of the Guatemalan National Police. He was captured and imprisoned to await trial. Miranda was himself assassinated in a Guatemalan prison on April 11, 2022. Gramajo continues to be Mayor of Villa Nueva. His current term ends in 2023.
Attorneys for ICE, who work for DHS, insisted that Escobar, Prof. Fontes, and the adult Arredondo family members appear for cross-examination at the rescheduled asylum hearing on October 7, 2022. The Immigration Judge permitted Escobar to testify via WebEx from Guatemala, and Prof. Fontes to testify by WebEx from Washington D.C. At the hearing, however, the DHS lawyer declined to cross-examine Escobar or Fontes and their sworn written testimony was accepted by the Immigration Judge, herself a former long-time employee of DHS and ICE.
On December 5, 2022, the Immigration Judge issued her written decision awarding asylum to the entire family on the basis of persecution based on implied political opinion. She relied heavily on Edwin Escobar's testimony.
Allen: Linda, your work has had such an impact in the lives of so many young asylum seekers and separated families. What takeaways from your experiences can you share with others looking to follow your lead?
Dakin-Grimm: In a situation that begs for massive change, but change seems impossible, don't look away. Instead, start where you are. Start with small things, in your neighborhood, in your town. Bring up the issue in your book club, with your pickleball league, at your church. Find one child who needs something (and don't assume you know what that is). Start with one small thing. I learned from Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein’s class at Harvard that when change seems impossible, “find the bright spots” and focus there.
I suggest that you create small bright spots that you and others can build on. Listen, listen, listen. Listen to others who have been living the issues. They know things you will never experience, even if they don't have a broad perspective. It can also be quite helpful to stay in the background, work from behind the scenes, and blow into the sails of others. I do not know if the U.S. immigration system will be reformed in my lifetime, but I hope to be able to continue blowing into the sails of younger people who will outlive me to make the change.
The Arredondo Family * Credit: Linda Dakin-Grimm
About the Author:
Julie Allen (Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow 2020/Senior Fellow 2021) is Director of Strategy and Communications at The EdRedesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Senior Editor-Education for the Harvard ALI Social Impact Review, member of the Advisory Board of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Chair of the Board of Read Ahead, a reading-based mentoring program for public elementary school children in New York City.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.