DHS Ordered to Expand Remote Legal Access for ICE Detainees

The Department of Homeland Security has been ordered by a federal judge in Washington to improve the telephone and video conferencing systems at four detention facilities in Louisiana and Georgia so that civil immigration detainees are able to confer more freely with their lawyers during the course of the coronavirus pandemic.

Social distancing is key to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many detention facilities have suspended in-person visits for legal counsel along with other measures, like expanding detainees’ access to face masks and cleaning supplies.

Remote communication has become the “primary vehicle” for immigration detainees to speak with their attorneys, but DHS’s efforts to bolster “the capacity and possibilities for remote legal visitation has been inadequate and insufficient,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Wednesday for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Those four facilities are the LaSalle Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in Jena, La.; Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Pine Prairie, La.; Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga.; and the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga.

The court laid out seven action items for DHS in its order. Those action items include reaching compliance with the optimal requirements of the Performance-Based National Detention Standards for telephone access; ensuring that the telephone and video-teleconferencing systems are in proper working order with troubleshooting protocols; establishing written internal and external procedures for scheduling attorney-client calls; and maintaining the confidentiality of attorney-client communications.

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed the motion for a temporary restraining order on behalf of the immigration detainees it represents at those facilities. The group had third-party standing to pursue a TRO because DHS’s restrictions on remote legal visitation has interfered with SPLC’s institutional purpose of advocating for individuals in government custody, the court said.

SPLC will likely succeed on the merits of its claims that DHS has violated the constitutional right to substantive due process by allegedly setting time limits on attorney-client calls from the four named facilities and purportedly canceling or rescheduling calls with little or no notice, the court said.

Kilpatrick Townsent & Stockton LLP and in-house counsel represent SPLC.

The Department of Justice represents DHS.

The case is S. Poverty Law Ctr. v. DHS, D.D.C., No. 18-cv-00760, 6/17/20.