WASHINGTON – Logan Guzman likes to pretend he’s a superhero. One week he’s Spiderman. The next he’s Batman. Whichever hero he embodies, the 4-year-old’s goal is always the same: He wants to save his father.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Logan’s dad, Pedro Guzman, 30, in front of the family’s Durham, N.C., home on Sept. 28, 2009. Logan and his mother, Emily, could only look on.
“I was scared, but in the back of my mind I just felt like everything would eventually be OK because I was a citizen and he was married to me,” said Emily Guzman, 33, a mental health therapist who was born and raised in the U.S.
Nearly 19 months later, Pedro Guzman is still in immigration custody after multiple requests for release on bond were denied. He has two misdemeanor marijuana-possession charges from 1998 on his record. Because of that he’s considered a flight risk. So he waits.
ICE detained 383,524 immigrants in 2009, according to its most recent annual report. Detention facilities consist largely of county jails and privately contracted detention centers.
Pedro Guzman sits in a cell at the large-scale Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., more than nine hours from his family in Durham and two hours from the Atlanta office of his attorney, Glen Fogle.
Revisions announced in 2009 aim to give detention facilities more federal oversight, but critics say the changes aren’t moving fast enough.
The fractured network of detention facilities, often located in remote, rural towns, means that many detainees never speak to lawyers.
“Unlike in the criminal system, where if someone can’t afford a lawyer they’re appointed one, in the immigration system you have a right to a lawyer but you have to find and pay for one yourself,” said Tara Tidwell Cullen of the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provides legal services and advocates for immigration policy restructuring.
Even if detainees have the resources to find lawyers, the isolated locations of many detention facilities put attorneys financially out of reach, Tidwell Cullen said.
