WRONGFUL DETENTION SUIT ILLUSTRATES PITFALLS OF ICE LOCKUPS
As of December 2023, only 30% of immigrants in deportation proceedings had lawyers, and unrepresented immigrants are far more likely to lose, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
For her part, Portillo Moreno tried to hire an immigration lawyer.
But according to Brandon Galli-Graves, an attorney with Texas-based nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services who's representing Portillo Moreno in her current lawsuit, several things went wrong.
For one, during the two months that she was sitting in Travis County's jail, she was evicted from her apartment and her car was repossessed, he said.
"She really didn't have any funds. The family tried to hire an immigration attorney when she was initially detained [in October 2019]," Galli-Graves said.
"And the immigration attorney provided very subpar services, and they ended up firing the attorney very shortly after that," he said. "But they hired that attorney with all of their remaining funds. And so our client just didn't have the economic means to be able to hire an immigration attorney to help her throughout this process."
Attorneys for Portillo Moreno told Law360 that they're still trying to gather additional documents about her time in detention. But they said that based on what they know now, she never had a bond hearing.
