Immigration hits home: how new immigration policies affect Iowa City and how Iowa City is responding, Iowa City, Iowa, November 15, 2017

- [Janet Lyness] ICFRC hosts community program to address topics of international interest. We thank our members, volunteers, and interns for making these forums possible since, ready? Every Breath You Take by The Police was the number one pop song in 1983. I want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors: the University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, the University of Iowa's Center for Public Policy, and the Stanley U of I Foundation Support Organization, for their financial support. I also thank today's special sponsors, Heidi Galer and, actually, myself and John Wadsworth. I was happy to get to sponsor this particular program too. I also thank City Channel 4 for professionally recording our programs for cable cast on City Channel 4 or 118-2, and the U of I's library's archives, their digital archives. Now, I am very happy to introduce Professor Bram Elias, who I'm also happy to say, is my friend. Professor Bram Elias is a clinical associate professor at the University of Iowa's College of Law and directs the clinic's immigration practice. Bram received his BA from the University of Michigan and MA from the Queen's University in Belfast, and MPP from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a JD from Yale University Law School. He also clerked for Senior Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and for Judge Denise Casper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Prior to joining the University of Iowa College of Law, Bram worked as an immigration attorney in private practice here in Iowa City where his work focused on federal immigration law, removal defense, immigration-related family law issues in state court, and immigration-related post-conviction review and habeas corpus litigation in state and federal courts. Today, Professor Bram Elias will be speaking about the most common problems and changes that are seen locally as a result of the new tenor of immigration politics and policies being spread by the Trump administration. He will give specific examples in his discussion and speak about his students' work within this area. So please join me in welcoming Professor Bram Elias. - [Bram Elias] Well, thank you. Thanks to the church for hosting us. Thanks to County Attorney Lyness for helping set this up and to the FRC. It's especially fun to do this with Janet doing the introduction. Not only is she a friend of mine, but she is also, before I knew that she was the host for today's event, when I was setting the speech up to talk about the different interesting and exciting ways Iowa City is responding creatively and helpfully to changes in immigration law, I had a whole section just on Janet. And then I started, yeah, yeah, clapping for Janet would be great, that's right. Then I felt awkward once I found out she was a host so I edited that part down because I'm shy. But if you really want to participate in the Q and A and you're not sure what to write on your card, feel free to write, "What else were you going to say "about Janet Lyness?" And I'll put that in at the end. So again, thanks for having me here. My name is Bram Elias and I teach immigration law over at the law school, and I run our immigration clinic in the clinical program. Instead of standing up and lecturing in front of a big room, my students actually go into court and represent clients. If we do well, we win, the client really wins. If we do poorly and things don't work out, things really don't work out. They're working as real lawyers, and they are really involved in some of the cases and the stories I'll be talking about today. It means that unlike many professors who have lots of practice giving speeches to big rooms, that's not really my thing. So if you expected me to be really good at that, lower your expectations now and most of my job is sitting in my room with two or three of you. If we were doing that, you would think this was great. Regardless, I am still a law professor, and law is the main thing I'm used to talking about. And so my plan today is to start by talking about immigration law, but I want to move as quickly as I can from that to more just telling stories of things that have been happening around Iowa City and the way that changes in immigration law and policy and politics and culture, just in the last year or so, have been playing out on the ground here in Iowa City. So we'll start with the law piece, but I'll move beyond that as quickly as I can. So here's the law lecture part. If you can bear through this part to the storytelling, we'll be fine. One thing people worried about a lot during the last presidential election, certainly folks in the immigration community and immigration advocacy community worried about a lot, was that there would be a huge sea change in immigration law because immigration issues seemed so salient during the last presidential election. And when candidate Trump became President Trump on a platform that had suggested he was going to make major changes to immigration law, indeed, if you had to sum up his campaign in three words it probably would have been build the wall, focused almost exclusively on changing the way immigration law and policy is practiced. Many people were worried there was going to be a sea change. Lawyers and folks who work with immigration law, there was something we wanted to point out back at the time, and that has been borne out, so we want to stress it now, that it's still true, which is it's not that easy to change immigration law. There are sort of four components of immigration law. The first part, where most immigration law comes from, it's almost entirely federal law, and it comes from a federal statute that's been amended many times over the years, but the big statute's called the INA, the Immigration and Nationality Act. In order to change the INA, a president can't do that by him or herself. It requires Congress passing a law, the President signing it. That's what changes the law. If you've been paying attention to Congress these last couple of years, they're not signing anything big. No big laws are coming out of Congress, and that was pretty clear that there wasn't going to be anything like consensus on changes to immigration law to the statute, regardless of who the president was. And that's been true. There's been no movement whatsoever on changing immigration statutes, which are the most important part of immigration law. Now, there are some things that immigration statutes leave open. Words in statutes might be a little bit unclear. How will these words be applied in real life? Those are governed by things called federal regulations. In order to change a federal regulation, there's a process by which a federal agency has to propose new language in the regulation. There's a period called notice and comment, where people can suggest they like this change, they don't like this change. It's a long administrative process, and at the end of that process, if there is a way that the federal government wants to change the interpretation of a statute, that's one way to do it. But it can't be done quickly, and it can't be done unilaterally. It certainly can't be done just by a president. And as we expected, there have been almost no changes to immigration regulations since the new president has taken office. So immigration statutes haven't changed. Immigration regulations haven't changed. When both the statute and the regulation still leave some confusion or some wiggle room for how policies will be implemented on the ground, the next place you go to look to see how these laws work is through case law, decisions made by judges interpreting the words of those statues or those regulations, and case law evolves over time, with judges looking at what other judges have written and listening to what the parties say, and making new interpretations based on those old interpretations, further refining the language of the statute and the regulation. And although a president does have the power to appoint judges through the Senate, and in the immigration world, through internal appointments in the Department of Justice, it takes a long time for that to happen, and a president can't single-handedly change cases, either. So case law hasn't been, I mean, there are changes in the evolution of case law and immigration law, but there haven't been any huge cases in immigration law that have changed the landscape since President Trump took over. The statues have stayed the same. The regulations have stayed the same. The case law has largely stayed the same. To the extent that the statues and the regulations and the case law still leave some wiggle room in terms of how the laws are implemented, the one place the president can really affect things quickly is by changing the way those laws are enforced, as long as the enforcement does not violate the statute or the regulation or the case law. We have seen some changes in policies about how immigration statues, regulations, cases, have been enforced. But we haven't even seen a lot of that in the last year. What we have seen a lot of, a lot of, more than we've seen with any previous presidential administration, are press releases, it's not often you can get a laugh by waiting to say the word tweets, but. Press releases, tweets, suggestions of possible future changes in enforcement. Not even the actual change itself, just the possibility that something might change in the future. We've seen a lot of that. And so one thing the president has been able to do, without actually changing the law very much, is make people feel like the law is uncertain. One thing the previous presidential administration was very good at was trying to make immigration enforcement more efficient, for good or for ill, whatever your politics were about the way immigration laws were enforced, the previous administration was very clear about making sure the people who could be subject to immigration enforcement easily were the ones first subject to enforcement. People whose cases were more complicated would be the last ones subject to enforcement. And getting the word out to the people who enforce immigration law and to immigrants themselves that if you fell into one category, these are the people that the system is going to look for first. If you fell into the other category, not to worry. You're the sort of folks who immigration's not going to come looking for. The current presidential administration has completely scrambled that and has left people quite insecure as to where they stand vis-a-vis the law, even if the law itself hasn't changed. The main thing I want to talk about today is how that change, not in immigration law, but in the culture around immigration law, is having huge effects on the ground, that people suddenly feeling deeply uncertain about whether they, themselves, are safe, even if their actual level of safety hasn't changed at all, that overwhelming uncertainty is having huge legal and more than just legal effects. We see a lot of that at the local level, and I'll talk about that. I think one of the upshots of that level of uncertainty is that for people who are not involved in the legal world at all, for lawyers, but all just for anybody providing public services, it's a new world. It's a new day when it comes to working with immigrant clients, because things that public service organizations, lawyers, nonprofits, service providers, hospitals, banks, folks who worked with immigrants in the past, you used to do one thing and let everyone know we treat everybody the same, and that was sufficient to provide services. But now immigrant communities are sufficiently terrified that their relationship is changing with the rest of civil society, and that if we want to include all members of our community in the sort of service provision, whether it's health or welfare or law or whatever, civil society is going to have to reach out and do more than we did before, because we're now working with communities that are scared in a way that they weren't scared before. Okay, that's all a little abstract. Let me start to tell you some stories that hopefully will show you what it is I have in mind. The first thing to talk about, so we'll get away from the statutory framework. The first thing that, I will start with law because law's where I'm most comfortable. The place where there has first been culture change suggesting that folks who work with immigrants might need to reach out and do an extra step to make sure that immigrants receive equal justice has been the criminal justice system. There is a federal case called Padilla v. Kentucky from a few years back which said that criminal defense lawyers, even if they are not expert in immigration law, if they are representing non-citizen clients, they have an obligation to learn at least a little bit about immigration law and let their clients know, here's how your criminal justice case will affect your immigration status, if the answer to that question is clear. You don't have to be an expert in immigration law, but criminal defense lawyers who, before Padilla, didn't need to know anything about immigration and could just tell people, "Here's what the criminal justice consequences "of the case that we're working on, "here's what that will mean for you." After Padilla, once they had non-citizen clients, they had to learn at least a little bit so they could properly inform immigrant clients, this is how this might affect you. Now, what Padilla required of folks in different states wasn't very clear. It was a pretty low threshold. Last summer, the Iowa Supreme Court went, I think it's safe to say, farther than any other state supreme court has in the country, Iowa has now joined California as one of the two states that are most protective of immigrants rights in the criminal justice system. In Iowa, there was a case called Morales Diaz that came down last summer, and I'm particularly proud of it because the case was tried at the trial court level by an Iowa Law School clinic alum, it was tried at the state supreme court level by a Iowa Law alum, and the clinic, including my students, wrote an expert report that was used in the decision at the trial court level. So we're very proud of Morales Diaz. So Morales Diaz instructs Iowa criminal defense lawyers to know a lot about immigration law and be able to tell their clients, "If you take this plea, if you are convicted of this charge, "X, Y, and Z will happen to you." And if they get that information wrong, then that, if there's a guilty plea that comes out of that, the plea is unconstitutional. The person failed to receive their constitutional right to counsel under Iowa constitutional law. It's a big step forward, and it has led both defense attorneys, who now have stronger obligations, and thoughtful prosecutors who want to make sure the guilty pleas stick, to think in a little more nuance about how to make sure you can take extra steps with immigrant criminal defendants to make sure they're receiving equal justice, the same justice that they would receive if they weren't immigrants. And this is where I had a whole section on how maybe the leader in the state on this on the prosecution side has been County Attorney Lyness, who's been incredibly thoughtful about making sure that immigrants receive the same justice everyone else does, that they aren't treated differently because they know less about what they do. She's worked with students at the law school to think up ways to go through that. It's been amazing. I look forward to the card asking us to talk about that in detail. I'm also happy to talk about, on the criminal defense side in Iowa City, where our local public defender's office happens to be the office that employs one of two immigration specialists for the entire state of Iowa, where any time a criminal defense attorney, either a public defender or a private attorney who's representing a case on behalf of the public defense system, an indigent client, if there are questions about the immigration status of that defendant, and what a particular type of criminal justice outcome will do to that immigrant defendant, there is someone here in Iowa City who takes those phone calls and walks people through the case. We've never had anything like that at all before. It has always been criminal defense attorneys do one thing, and then the immigrant client comes to an immigration lawyer with a criminal conviction, and we say, "Oh, you shouldn't have taken that conviction. "That might have been good for a citizen, "but that's very bad for someone in your situation." Now, making sure that we do extra outreach to provide equal justice, it's really been Iowa City that's in the lead on that, both Janet and Julia Zalinski over at the public defender's office. Okay, enough of the law stuff. That's always where I feel like I need to start, especially because I want to show off what my students did with the Morales Diaz case, but there are other examples that I think might be a little more vivid of how things have changed now that there's this new level of fear and uncertainty about how laws apply to non-citizens. So there's a beautiful picture of the Iowa River. That's at night. There's Hancher reflecting off the river. Okay, so this story comes from late February of this year. So it was about a month after the president was sworn in. My clinic was represent, the client in this case has been more than eager to have his story told. So we had to get his permission to tell this story, even on keeping his name anonymous. We have a client in the clinic who has good immigration status. He has one form of legal status and we are helping him in the process of improving it from a temporary but long-standing form of legal status to permanent green card status, and then to citizenship five years down the road. He's in good shape, but he is an immigrant. He called our office and said, "ICE," Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the police, the law enforcement of the immigration system, "ICE officers were at his door, "and they were banging on his door, "and they wanted to come in." And he said, "I remember what I had learned "at some immigrant rights trainings, "which is that if they don't have a warrant, "I don't have to let them in, so I didn't let them in. "They didn't have a warrant, but they kept banging "on the door and saying, 'Let us in. "'We just want to talk. "'We want to talk to you. "'We know you're in there.'" He said, "I've been hiding under my dining room table, "because I don't know what they're here for "and I don't think this is safe. "They've left, but they're coming back, "and I wanted to call you and make sure "I'm doing everything right." And so my students came and said, "We just got this call from our client." I said, "We should sit down and maybe think "about writing him a memo, explaining what he should do." As I'm saying this to my students, my students are physically picking me up and carrying me to a university car to drive to the client's house, like, "We're going to tell him right now." So we drive over to his house and he explains to us that ICE was at the door and he did what he thought was the right thing. It was, in fact, the right thing. He exercised his rights correctly. We told him under what circumstances he had to let someone in, under what circumstances he didn't. While we are explaining this to him, "We know you're in there. "Come out, we just want to talk." My students were calm. I was terrified. At that point, your student is either going to get an A or an F for participation for the semester, and they all got A's. They were great. So my students are quietly murmuring to our client, "You don't need to answer unless they have a warrant. "You don't need to answer the door. "It's fine." There's this banging going on, and while we're explaining to our client what his rights are and that he is properly exercising them, quietly, our client's partner, his long-term girlfriend, who is not our client, who also has lawful, has good legal status but was working with a different attorney, says, "My attorney told me if law enforcement comes to the door, "I don't want to do anything to jeopardize "my pending application for status, "so I should answer the door." And as we say, we're trying to slow, she runs to the door and opens it, at which point, you want to know how to get an A in my class? One of my students stands up and physical stands between the officers as they come in and my client, and another student pulls out his phone and is filming the whole thing. And the officers come in, and they're in plain clothes. They're asking questions. They're asking for names. They don't ask immediately about immigration status, but they say, "We know you've been hiding all day. "You don't need to hide all day. "We told you we just wanted to talk. "We were really confused about what was going on." It took us my three native English-speaking students and me, three law students and a lawyer, 10 minutes to realize that these plain clothes law enforcement officers weren't from ICE at all. They were from the Johnson County Sheriff's office. They weren't there to do anything even remotely immigration-related. In fact, so this part's a little sad, they were there because there had been a body that washed up in the Iowa River, and they were trying to figure out if this was a death of natural causes, was it an accident, or was this going to be a homicide investigation. They're trying to close the investigation. They said, "We're just having the hardest time. "Everyone we talk to in the Latino community, "no one's answering their door. "What's the matter with everyone?" And you know, the fact that it took native English-speaking law students 10 minutes to figure out what was going on helps explain why it might be terrifying, folks who, just to explain more about our client's situation, the reason why he is on the path to permanent status, he's in the process of getting something called a U visa, which is a form of immigration status you get for cooperating with law enforcement to investigate crimes. So our client has been perfectly happy to work with law enforcement in the past, and is not unhappy to do it now, but is constantly terrified that any law enforcement official, until he's shown otherwise, he's terrified that it's immigration. Even though he has good immigration status, he's afraid to talk to them 'cause he's heard terrible stories about how everyone's under threat now. We weren't the only ones who noticed this. We met with the sheriff, and my students set up meetings with the sheriff and the chief of police. Just after this happened there was an article in the Press Citizen where Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek said in the paper that officials are requesting the public's assistance with the ongoing investigation of this woman's death, but understand that some people who know her might be reluctant to come forward, quote, "Out of fear of potential immigration enforcement issues," even though his office has nothing to do with prosecuting those enforcement issues. There are lots of things to say about this, but the one I want to focus on today, the angle I want to focus on for today, is that those officers at the door weren't doing anything different than they had done for years before that, and it had always worked fine. But levels of trust dropping in immigrant communities that have nothing to do with conduct by the sheriff's office, that have everything to do with politics coming out of Washington, D.C, are now making it hard for the sheriff's office to close death cases. And if you want to think about it from the immigrant perspective, it means that friends and loved ones of immigrants who are either victims of crime or who are turning up in death cases through no criminal act at all, are having a much harder time getting to justice or getting closure on their case because this level of fear is pulling immigrant communities away from civil society in a way that they weren't pulled away before, and that if we want that relationship to be there, it's actually going to take affirmative steps by folks like the sheriff's office and the police department, which is happening, but they have to do more than they did before to get the same result they had before. I understand why, from law enforcement's perspective, that seems incredibly unfair. But if we want to get the same criminal justice results we got before in this new era, it turns out more has to happen. Okay, so there are other examples more egregious than what's going on in Iowa City that I want to point up quickly, not spend a ton of time on. You may have heard about both of these next two examples come out of Los Angeles, where there's been a particularly bitter standoff between the state of California, cities in California, and the federal immigration system about federal immigration impeding trust between law enforcement in California and immigrant communities. So this photo is from the LA Times. This actually happened to come out the same day that our client had folks knocking on his door here in Iowa City, where the story was about how Los Angeles' top elected officials are urging federal authorities to stop the practice of immigration officers identifying themselves as police in the course of immigration investigations, because the police chief was finding out that after decades of trying to build trust in Los Angeles where, you might know, if you remember the O.J. Simpson case, there was a long history of bad race relations between law enforcement, especially city police, and communities of color. And in recent decades, there have been Herculean efforts by the police to try and fix that, and they were making really good progress. It all stopped when immigration starts knocking on doors saying, "We're police," because once word gets around the immigrant community that if you hear police at your door, it might be immigration, suddenly no one's answering the door. And so the city, the mayor, the city attorney, the city council president, and the police chief sent a letter to ICE saying, "Please, stop, "you're undermining our efforts to provide public safety." And ICE said, "No, we're legally entitled "to identify ourselves as police, "and the easiest way to communicate "across cultural boundaries that we are law enforcement "and we are to be obeyed is to say police. "Not everyone understands the word ICE "or Immigrations Customs Enforcement." And so they said, "No, we're going to continue "wearing police uniforms and identifying ourselves "as police when we do raids, and if that has bad knock on "effects for your public safety system, "then maybe your public safety system is doing too much "to coddle your immigrant communities." I think even scarier is another thing that's been happening in California. We haven't seen this in eastern Iowa yet. We've heard rumors that this might be happening in Des Moines, although nothing confirmed yet. In California and in some other places, immigration officers are going to public places where they think they might run into people who might be out of status and checking to see if folks have good immigration status or not, and one of the public places they have focused on has been court rooms, going to public court houses and looking for names on docket sheets, the names of cases for the day. And if you see a Latino-sounding name, at least ask, just ask, do you have status? Of course, once word gets out, so this is a photo of a guy being arrested after his own criminal hearing where he was a witness in a criminal case in California, and then was arrested by ICE in the hallway. They weren't looking for him individually. They just had his name and asked him and he admitted he didn't have status and they arrested him at the courthouse. You can imagine, when that story gets out, immigrants, especially those without status, will be a little wary of coming to testify. There have been reports of huge drop offs in domestic violence courts of people complaining that they're the victims of domestic violence and they need a protective order, but it's not safe to go because there was a story in Phoenix of ICE waiting outside domestic violence hearings to ask people their status. It's not because the California legal system or the Arizona legal system or the Iowa legal system isn't absolutely committed to providing equal justice to immigrants, regardless of their status. If you need a domestic violence protective order, you are entitled to one. If you're going to testify in court to help close a criminal case, we need you to testify. But in an environment where that place no longer feels safe in the same way, it's possible, in order to knit society together, extra steps might have to be taken, which is one of the reasons so heroic Janet is here. Okay, so that's on the criminal justice side, but I want to move a little bit further away from law into another story. This is a sandwich. I remind you, because we had sushi for lunch today, so you may have forgotten. But this is a sandwich. So there is a doctrine in immigration law known as public charge doctrine. It shows up a couple of different places in immigration statutes. The big idea behind public charge doctrine, a public charge is someone who can't afford to take care of themself and may need to rely on government benefits, welfare, things like that, in order to get by. And since the 1800s, there has been authority, though it's not often used, for immigration to treat immigrants who become public charges or who are at risk of becoming public charges, differently from other folks in the immigration system. The only time it's ever really been applied was in the 1800s at the border that you couldn't enter the United States unless you could demonstrate you would not become a public charge. It had never been used of someone being in the United States receiving benefits to which they were lawfully entitled, and then nonetheless being removed because they had become a public charge. That had never happened and it would be very unclear, it's not clear that it would be constitutional to do that today. Nonetheless, during the presidential campaign, the Trump campaign talked about reinvigorating public charge doctrine as a grounds for removing immigrants who are already in society, already living in the United States. And then, once he became the president, his administration took over, they made a public statement of, we are looking into the possibility of reinvigorating public charge doctrine as a ground for removal. Not just in admissibility, but removal, getting someone out of the country. It was never actually put into a policy. Again, this was just a press release. This didn't even rise to the level of presidential tweet. This was a departmental press release. But it was picked up very quickly in Spanish-language media that there's a concern that people might be, that public charge doctrine might come back, and if that's the case, immigrants who have received public benefits might lose their status, even if they had lawful status. It wasn't true. That wasn't going to happen, but there was concern that it might. So I will take a step back. Soon after the election, a group of immigration lawyers, immigration advocates, and a couple of very well-connected members of the immigrant community started meeting every month or so at the law school just to touch base so we knew each other and were friendly with each other so that in the event of a crisis, we'd be able to do something together quickly as opposed to have to introduce ourselves. It also sort of turned into a group therapy session. We started to hear stories. Some of the stories I'm telling you are coming out of this, including this one. We had a lot of representation from folks who work in the public school system, and one thing they heard was that as soon as this public charge story went out, United States citizen children of parents of various immigration status, many of immigrants who have valid legal status just weren't citizens, but U.S. citizen children who were entitled to free and reduced lunch were turning away sandwiches at lunchtime at school because their parents had heard that if the kids took the free food at school, the parents might be removed. This had no basis whatsoever in law. This was a press release put out by the Department of Homeland Security about something that might happen, and that press release was enough for hundreds of children in Iowa City to stop eating at school. If you want to get into what that's going to do for their test scores for afternoon tests and what it'll do the longterm, it's, I mean, just the littlest non-legal action, nonetheless, has this huge policy impact, this lived impact, of kids turning away food, hungry kids who need the food turning away the food that they are legally entitled to. And that if we want to make sure that we're having the same educational outcomes that we want, the education system and the Iowa City Community School District has actually been pretty amazing about this, needs to start thinking creatively about how to make sure immigrants feel safe there too so they exercise the legal rights they have. All right. I promise we'll end on a happy note, but we've got a ways to go before we get there. So here is a picture from September 26th. I mentioned that group of folks who hangs out every month or so at the law school, and there's an email list of folks who participate in that group so we can keep each other posted. So this photo was attached to an email that went around the night of September 26th, and here's what the text of the email was from one of the people in the group. "Hello, all. "I attach a picture from two Border Patrol cars "parking at the Hampton Inn hotel located "at Highway 1 and Riverside next to Staples. "Is hard to know if they come into Iowa City "or they just make stop to stay overnight. "I'm planning to return later tonight "and tomorrow morning to check any activity "like more cars or bus. "If someone goes there, please let the group know." And then we got a series of emails throughout the course of the night, every 15 minutes until about 10 p.m., saying, "Yeah, the cars are still there. "We don't see any more cars." And no one knew. Was there a raid going on? There were always rumors that immigration officials might come in and sweep through communities that have large immigration populations like Iowa City does. Was there a raid? What was happening? I tried to chime in and say, "I'm just the technical lawyer guy, "but CBP Border Patrol is a different agency "from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, ICE. "Border Patrol only does raids near the border. "They would not be doing one in the interior in Iowa. "If we were going to have a raid, "it would probably be ICE vehicles. "I don't know what's happening. "I'm not saying everything is safe, "but I don't know if it's wise to panic yet." But of course, it was far too late for that. The next day, Latino student attendance at school plummeted. We had a client of the clinic, totally unrelated to this situation at all, totally different case, came in for a, we were meeting to talk about his naturalization process. He said, "By the way, I don't know if you heard "that there was an ICE raid last night, "but I told my wife to stay home from work. "I hope that was the right thing to do. "She thinks she might get fired, "but we figured it was better to be safe than sorry." We don't know how many immigrants lost their jobs because they skipped work that day because they heard there was an ICE raid. Here's what was happening. The next morning there was a job fair in the IMU. Customs and Border Patrol was one of hundreds of organizations and agencies that were there to hire Iowa undergraduates. There couldn't have been anything less nefarious that was going on. In fact, if you look at the CBP car, you probably can't see it from there, but there's a little sticker on the back that says, "Join us, www.cbp.gov/careers." I mean, this is their job fair person who had come here. But just the fact that the car was parked overnight affected who was attending school and who was going to work the next day. We are having meetings with folks at the university to make sure that we think through how things go when we have job fairs in the future, but I mean, this is not something you had to think about when you were planning a job fair for Iowa undergraduates a year ago. Okay, the saddest story, and then we'll get on to better stuff. This is the hospital. This is the emergency room over at the UI hospital across the river. So this is, I think, in some ways, the saddest story to come out of the Monday night group or the group that meets at the law school, but it is too powerful to not share. So one of the people who came to one of the meetings works at the emergency room. She said she's in the insurance office. If you've ever gone through the UI emergency room, the last thing you do when you check out is there's a payment and insurance window up front. The woman said, "I'm one of the people "who staffs that window. "Folks who have insurance think of me "as a payment window, like you go to pay stuff. "But for folks who have insurance, we don't do very much. "We just do some quick paperwork. "Most of the time at my job is spent working "with people who don't have insurance trying "to figure out how we're going to make sure "the hospital gets paid for whatever treatment "the person just received. "We think of ourselves more as social workers "trying to connect the folks who have come "through the system with whatever financial resources "we can think of to make sure they get the care they need." They think of themselves as advocates for uninsured patients. They're very proud of the work they do. The work they do is terrific. She said, this story was a couple of months ago, but she said, a week ago she saw a repeat client, a repeat patient, who she was used to seeing. Folks with chronic problems who don't have insurance otherwise show up repeatedly in the emergency room. She said, "There's this one guy. "We know him really well. "He's a really nice guy and he has a chronic "drinking problem and he has bad liver problems, "and every couple of months or so he shows up, "or every month or so he shows up, "and we know exactly what the problem is. "We know the pathway to get his care paid for. "We know exactly, at the beginning it was hard, "but now we know what to do to take care of him. "So whenever he comes in, I rush from my little seat "at the front to the doctor's room where he's being seen "and say, 'Here's his file. "'Here's his medical needs. "'Here's how we get it paid for.' "We know exactly what to do." And so she sees him come in, and she said, "He looks worse than he usually looks. "But maybe it's a tough time of year, who knows?" So she goes to the doctor's office and she says, "Oh, hey, my guy is here." She says his name. She's like, "Yeah, here's the file. "Here's what needs to be done medically "based on his history. "Of course, you're the doctor, you decide, "and here's how we pay for it." And the nurse in the room said, "Oh, that's not this patient's name." And she looked at the patient who, by this time she knew pretty well, and she's like, "Hey," like, "It's me, remember? "This is you, right? And he looked at her and said, "Sorry, no English." She said, "Okay, we can do this in Spanish if you want." And so she starts speaking to him in Spanish. He's like, "Sorry, don't understand, don't understand." She's like, "I think, maybe is he in so much pain "that he doesn't remember who he is?" The nurse says even the birthdate is wrong on the file. This isn't the same guy. The social worker's thinking, "Is my guy in so much acute distress "he can't accurately report his own birthdate?" And the minute the nurse leaves the room, the patient bursts into tears and looks at the social worker and says, "Please don't call the police." And she says, "What?' And he says, "We all know that now, if you're undocumented "and you come in for emergency care, you get arrested "and then you get deported. "So I've been trying really hard not to come in, "even though the pain has been really bad. "But it was just so bad my wife said "I really need to come in." She said, "No, we don't call. "We're the hospital. "We don't call the police." Then she said to us, one thing that they do do sometimes is they do have a protocol where if someone is giving a fake name and they think it might be drug-seeking behavior, there are protocols to call law enforcement to get people into drug diversion. It's the one way you might get called is if you give a fake name or give the fake birthday. But she said, "No, no, no. "Of course that's not what we do." They did eventually get him the care he needed. They found out that the problem he had had reached a point where it was life-threatening. And she came, the social worker comes to our group and says, "I feel like we've got to do something about this "because I was thinking, I usually see "this guy once a month, and it had been months "since I'd seen him. "If what was going on is he was having the same "medical care and he used to go to the hospital "and now he's staying out of the hospital "'cause he thinks it's not a safe place "to be an immigrant, and then I started thinking "I usually see about six or seven undocumented people "or folks without insurance and no access to it "because of their immigration status, six or seven a week, "but since the election it's only been about one a week. "And I talked to my other colleagues who work, "the other social workers, "and they're all seeing the same thing. "We're just seeing systematically a drop off "in the number of people who are coming in to the ER." There hasn't been any change in law at all for folks in that situation. The hospital hasn't changed its policies. Everything's exactly the same. But at least anecdotally we think there are people avoiding care and possibly dying rather than go to the hospital for care they are legally entitled to because of this change in culture, which is a concern for those of us who are advocates in the community. I don't expect there will be anyone in this room who is more moved by dollars and cents than human stories like that, although there are some folks like that out there, so I have one last dollars and cents-ish anecdote before I turn to the happy stuff. This, of course, is the old capital, just down the way. You all know it very well. This is a special photo of the old capital. This was the photo that ran in the New York Times on Monday as the photo accompanying the story titled, Fewer Foreign Students are Coming to the United States, Survey Shows. The first academic official quoted in the article about this nationwide trend is our own Dean Downing Thomas from the International Program here at the university talking about how international enrollment at Iowa this fall was 3,564 students down from 4,100 in 2015, and that number is still high because it includes students who came earlier on a student visa and who are continuing their studies. Number of international student applicants is cratering across the United States, especially at public schools. It's partly the Muslim ban, the travel bans, that are preventing folks from certain countries from coming here, but even many countries that aren't affected by the travel ban at all, at Iowa, it's mostly been a drop in Chinese applicants, and China is not touched by the travel ban at all. But there is an international understanding, it would be hard to miss it, that the United States has recently become much more hostile towards immigrants and visitors, without a change in the law, right? Just reading the news you think that, and that affects who chooses to come here for school. And at public schools that have a difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition, my goodness, if we aren't eager to welcome international students who pay out-of-state or international full freight to go to the university, and Iowa is not alone among public universities across the state that have tried to make up for cuts in public funding from the state legislatures, wherever they are, by filling in with an increase in international students who help pay for the way the university runs. And in college towns like Iowa City, that actually controls a meaningful chunk of the local economy. Another school mentioned in the article is the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Missouri, where in one year international students dropped from over 2,600 to 944. That's a drop of almost 50%-60% in one year. Meanwhile, the University of Toronto is building new wings from all of the students who are desperate for an elite English-language education, and now Canada's the place to go. And whether you feel strongly about folks staying home and refusing to go to the hospital because they're afraid, even though they're legally entitled to go, you will start to feel it when you see stores close in downtown Iowa City. And that will happen, and it will happen in cities like Iowa City across the country, unless we can find a way to make people feel welcome here. So how do we make people feel welcome here? Iowa City is pretty special compared to what we're seeing in the national narrative, and there's just a couple of things I want to point to as sort of up ways to end and why this is such a nice place to be. So one is, we'll start with policy before we get to individual politics and stories. But you might know about the Johnson County Community ID. For those of you who write, "Tell us more about Janet," on your card, we will talk about the community ID and her leadership role in that. So the community ID is a form of public identification issued by the county that you are eligible for if you live in Johnson County, regardless of immigration status. It lets you do lots of things, and one of them is give legal identification to law enforcement. If you're the victim of a crime or you're the witness to a crime or you need help from law enforcement and you don't want to show documents that turn over your immigration status, here is legal government-issued ID that allows you to safely participate with law enforcement, with banks, with stores. It's not just for immigrants. It's for anybody who has trouble getting a state ID. But what this does is allows folks, regardless of status, feel safe, identically knit into the community. I don't mean to stand here and advocate for it, although I like it because my students helped design it, the one thing it does do is push back against the narrative that immigrants are separated out. This is a way of making people feel treated the same, actually treat, it's creating a policy that reaches out to people differently to get the same equal treatment and make folks feel at home. If you're a member of Johnson, if you're part of our Johnson County community, you're welcome and entitled to government services. But I think there are symbolic examples that are much more powerful than this. So many of you may know our new city council member, Mazahir Salih. So this is Mazahir. She was just elected to the Iowa City City Council last Tuesday. I don't mean to say anything political about supporting her or not supporting her. I just want to talk about the symbolism of her story. So Mazahir, for those of you who don't know her, she's a Sudanese immigrant. She's a naturalized United States citizen, but comes from the Sudan, moved to Iowa City only about five years ago. She announced her candidacy for the city council on March 6, 2017, which was, by chance, not by design, the same day President Trump announced Muslim Ban 2.0, the second version of the travel ban after the first travel ban and been enjoined by courts. Mazahir and travel ban two came out the same day. Travel ban two didn't do so well. It was promptly enjoined by the courts, in a sense, expired without ever taking effect. There's travel ban three that's being litigated. Travel ban two didn't fare well. Mazahir, on the other hand, won the city-wide election with 77% of the vote, which is neat. This is Mazahir. She's occasionally a hijab-wearing observant Muslim, former refugee, Sudanese nationalized U.S. citizen who's on the city council. But that's not really the extraordinary thing. The extraordinary thing is that, as far as I could tell, I'm not a political expert or anything, but for the course of the campaign for city council, no one cared. She didn't run for city council as an immigrant candidate, and opposition to Mazahir wasn't based on her immigrant status or her different status. The big issues in the campaign were tax increment financing and the way we're going to handle development downtown or in the neighborhoods, the regular Iowa City politics stuff. It wasn't even mentioned that someone like Mazahir with Mazahir's status and history and public presentation would be treated the same as any other city council candidate, would be seen as the same as any other city council candidate, and that what people cared about wasn't what her status was when she got here but how she felt about bike lanes. There are some of us who think that this was the kind of society we were promised a while ago, that this is what we were heading towards. I think a group like the FRC takes steps to make folks from different places feel like, if you're here, if you're in Iowa City, if you're in the larger university community, what we care about is who you are and what you contribute and not your status, that once you're here you're part of the family. And Iowa City, on purpose through policy and just by accident, is demonstrating that all the time. And the issues going forward will be what we can do as a community to take the affirmative steps we now have to take to make sure we can reach those accomplish now in this new, sort of changed environment. So thank you very much. - [Janet Lyness] Well, while we're waiting for some questions, I was going to ask you, if you could describe for them the story that you told me just before lunch about the student who was preparing and then immigration policy changed between your meeting in the morning and that afternoon, her meeting with a client. - [Bram Elias] Yeah. Yes, I even mentioned to the county attorney that we just, in terms of how fast things were changing, we were joking about how when you give a talk these days about immigration law, it's a public talk. You should turn your phone off, but if you turn your phone off, you might miss a change in law that affects your talk, 'cause everything's moving so quickly. And we had a student last semester, when things were really moving hot and heavy in the first couple months of the presidential administration, a student who was working on a naturalization case, a client who had a green card, which gives them permanent status, but was going through the status to become a permanent, lifetime U.S. citizen, which is always a very fun, exciting case to work on, and this particular student had worked on some cases in the clinic with me before, usually as part of a team. She was great, but this was her first individual representation, had her own client all to herself, and she was really nervous. So we prepared what the naturalization interview was going to go like, what she'd say to the client, how straightforward it was for this particular client to become a citizen. We practiced the interview. I pretended to be the client and my student was the lawyer. She was great. So I leave the student to go talk to the client. My wife and I go, give a talk to the law school faculty about changes that are happening in immigration law. The client comes in, we finish our talk, I come back downstairs to the clinic office, just to touch base quickly with my student, and while my wife and I were giving our talk to the law school, the President issued the first Muslim ban. I think it might have been the second one. It might have been the second one that came down. It listed a series of countries from which people, predominantly Muslim countries, from which people would not be allowed to enter the United States, and it appeared, on first blush, to say folks from any of these countries, not only could they not enter the United States, but if they were here, any application they had submitted to improve their status in any way was, for the foreseeable future, stopped. They would not accept applications and they would hold in advance any applications that were pending. And our client came from one of the countries on the list. So my student, who had prepared for this absolutely straightforward naturalization, then had to say to the client, "Sorry, as of 10 minutes ago, "you're not eligible to naturalize, potentially ever. "You might never get to be a U.S. citizen." Until this policy changed. The way it works with this current administration, that policy was pulled back in a week, and so the week after that the student did a good enough job with the client that the client hung with us and a week later was on path to naturalize and the student did a great job. But there was this feeling last semester, and we still feel a little bit now, of just totally at sea, that there's a storm going on and things are always changing. So I'll see what questions you have, or if something changed since I talked. - [Janet Lyness] My parents want me to delete my social media due to recent news that immigrants' social media is being monitored. Is there a legitimate concern for this? - [Bram Elias] Well, first of all, we already had one point where the whole room laughed at the word tweet, so we know what social media is. That's good. I wish the answer to this question was just, no, you have nothing to be worried about. It is mostly no, you have nothing to be worried about, but it's not quite that simple. There has been talk of asking people if they leave the United States, and then try and enter, really if they've ever been there or not, when non-citizens try to enter the United States, so they fly here from abroad or they drive up from abroad and cross the border to request admission to the United States, when they go through customs, to turn over their social media passwords so that they government can look through their Facebook accounts or whatever, to see if there are signs of terrorism or radicalization. This largely came about when some people who committed some terrorist atrocities in the United States, they, folks looked through their Facebook account and saw that they had once said something on Facebook that looked scary in retrospect. It has not gone into effect yet. I don't know of my clients entering the United States being asked for this yet. But it does not require anything other than the Border Patrol officer asking for it at the border, that's the change in policy right there. So does someone need to delete their account? No, absolutely not. But there is the possibility that if you leave the United States and then try and reenter, that in the future, and we don't know when that future is, it could be tomorrow, it could be years from now, it could be never, in the future, Border Patrol officers might ask for access to your social media as part of admitting you to the country. And if there are things on your social media you would not want the government to see, then you probably want to clear that out first or not leave and then reenter the country. If they actually try and do that, there will certainly be lawsuits up the wazoo. We'll have to see how it all shakes out, and there's nothing in place now. There's no need to just delete accounts generally, but it is not clear that that will all be private when you cross the border in the future. So the answer is mostly you're safe, but there is that to worry about. - [Janet Lyness] Are there things that ordinary Iowa citizens, non-lawyers, can do to help in protecting immigrant members of our community in promoting and supporting your efforts or Janet's? - [Bram Elias] If you'd like to know how to promote and support Janet's efforts, you can come talk to her right after lunch is over. So there are a couple of things. Natalia, do you mind if I just make everyone come talk to you? So this is Natalia Espina. Wave to everybody, Natalia. This is Natalia. Natalia is one of the folks who's been hanging out with the group of people who meets every once in a while at the law school. She started what I think is the single most amazing organization that has come out of those meetings. One thing that we realized was a big problem when these groups of folks ran in together is that the new Trump administration is sweeping more immigrants into removal proceedings, although not actually succeeding in removing them, because they're not prioritizing easy cases, but they are detaining immigrants for a long period of time. And if you are in immigrant detention, so if you're a immigrant and you're in immigration proceedings, the government has the right to suggest that you should be held in jail for the duration of your immigration proceedings, not because you did anything wrong, but because we have to make sure you'll show up for your immigration hearing and not skip out on the meeting in court. There is no data suggesting immigrants skip out on meetings in court at rates higher than the criminal justice system. Nonetheless, that's the concern. People who are in detention during their immigration proceedings are on a separate clock. Their cases go really quickly because the government doesn't want to pay for their room and board every night. The government also allows you, if you're in detention, to pay a bond, give money to the government as a loan to prove that you will show up at your hearing, and then when you do show up for your immigration hearing, you get your money back. Once you are out of detention on bond, you're put on a slower calendar. Detained cases are usually heard within two weeks to three months of the case starting, the arrest starting. People who are not detained, their cases are usually heard in four or five years. And during those four to five years, you're able to work with a lawyer to make the strongest case you can for yourself, collect evidence, your family circumstances might change in a way to give you a defense. The difference between being on the detained calendar and the non-detained calendar has enormous ramification for immigrants who are caught up in the system. The problem is, it's hard to pay bond if you don't have any money. Even though it's just a loan you're giving the government, they give it back, it's hard to pay it if you don't have it. And so Natalia helped start a nonprofit that pools, that takes donations, it pools money, and then when immigrants are in removal detention, it pays their bond to get them out. So they're still in removal proceedings, they're just on the slow clock, working with lawyers. And then, at the end of the process, the person shows up in court, the bond fund gets its money back. It's called the Eastern Iowa Community Bond Fund. It makes a huge difference for low-income immigrants swept up in the immigration system, especially ones who have good immigration defenses. They take donations and they take volunteers and they're looking for folks to help. They've been growing like crazy. In the event there ever is a large-scale raid in eastern Iowa where there are many, many people detained at once, the existence of something like the bond fund is the difference between hundreds of people being deported and hundreds of people staying in the community. So one easy way to help is talk to Natalia, or, is it communitybondfund.org? - [Natalia] Community Bond Project. - [Bram Elias] Communitybondproject.org, com, org? - [Natalia] Org. - [Bram Elias] Communitybondproject.org, and either donate or volunteer. They're making a huge difference in the lives of folks who are right up against immigration enforcement right now. So that's one way. - [Audience Member] Is the amount of the bond the same for everybody? - [Bram Elias] Great question, is the amount of the bond the same for everybody? No, it varies, and it can range anywhere from $3,000 is the floor, and we've seen bonds as high as $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, depending on the situation. Sometimes you actually need a lawyer to argue that the bond number should be lowered first, and then when you get it lowered from 50 to, say, five, then the bond fund goes and pays it. Great question, thank you. - [Janet Lyness] There are some other good questions. Unfortunately, we are out of time, so maybe Professor Elias will stay around for a few minutes to ask them if you want to come up and ask. So at this time, though, we need to conclude our program and I want to give a big thank you to Professor Bram Elias for his presentation, thank you. I will add, and thank him for his work as well. I also thank our sponsors, the University oF Iowa's Internationals Program, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, the University of Iowa Public Policy Center and the Stanley U of I Foundation Support Organization for their generous support. And we also thank today's special sponsors, Heidi Galer and Janet Lyness and John Wadsworth, and we thank City Channel 4 for making our programs available for viewing audiences. And Bram, we didn't want you to be the only one in the household without a very, very coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, so with our thanks, we give you one to share it with Stella, so. - [Bram Elias] That's good. - [Janet Lyness] Okay, thank you. - [Bram Elias] Thank you. - [Janet Lyness] So thank you again for joining us, and we are adjourned.