On Friday February 3, 2017, University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law will host a day-long conference on the detention of Central American Families in the United States.
The conference will bring together advocates, law students, and academics throughout the nation who have been fighting to end the detention of immigrant families.
In June 2014, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reinstituted an abandoned policy of detaining children and their parents seeking asylum in the United States. Families were first held in Artesia, New Mexico, which was accurately described as a “deportation mill,” and now in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, along with a smaller detention center in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Thousands of children and their mothers have now been held in confinement while their cases are processed, with a small portion of the families held for more than a year. The conference will examine the history of family detention, along with the various advocacy strategies, litigation-based and otherwise, advanced to end this practice. We will also hear from law student volunteers from UDC and Lewis & Clark who have engaged with detained families during or after their release from detention.
Register here: http://www.law.udc.edu/events/EventDetails.aspx?
