Austin and the world—particularly the immigrant rights community—are so indebted to the work and leadership of Barbara Hines who is now retiring from her position at UT as longtime clinical professor of law. Here is her reflection on the imprisonment of immigrants and children of immigrants, the majority of whom are unaccompanied minors from Central America fleeing drug violence and grinding poverty in Latin America:
The Hutto case for which Hines served as co-counsel was one of her
greatest legal victories. But in the years since – just months before
her imminent retirement – she's seen history repeat itself, in the
Karnes County Residential Center. The facility – this one 100 miles to
the south – was established last summer to help contain the exodus of
mostly child immigrants, arriving largely from Guatemala, El Salvador,
and Honduras. "Even though they don't have children in prison uniforms,
this is an unlicensed facility just like Hutto. It's run by a private
prison corporation just like Hutto. I've been there twice, and saw
really stressed-out children and stressed-out mothers – just like
Hutto."
As at Hutto, conditions at the Karnes County facility are hardly
welcoming to refugees. In op-eds, Hines has assailed such privately run
detention centers established under the auspices of the Department of
Homeland Security to deal with the latest influx of immigrant children.
She draws parallels to Hutto, and says the new centers are "stepping
back in history to the agency's last failed policy of detaining children
and their parents."
In short, Hines is a celebrated heroine of local, state, national and international renown.
I wish you well on your retirement, Barbara. Thank you for your outstanding leadership and the thousands of lives that you have touched, both directly and indirectly throughout your years of bold and courageous advocacy.
-Angela
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2014-12-12/barbaras-fire/
Barbara's Fire
Attorney, teacher, and veteran fighter for freedom, Barbara Hines retires from a career mentoring students
By Tony Cantú, December 12, 2014, News
Barbara Hines has spent a lifetime fighting the good fight. Longtime
clinical professor of law, and currently co-director of the Immigration
Clinic at the UT-Austin School of Law, she got her start in the trenches
of the abortion rights battles – at a time when the landmark Roe v. Wade
U.S. Supreme Court decision became a flashpoint and milestone – before
eventually switching her focus to the similarly polarizing issue of
immigrants' rights.
Today, as she eases into professional retirement by December's end,
she is inevitably reflective. While clearly proud of her body of work,
she is nonetheless discouraged by so much political regression about the
very issues for which she has fought so long and so hard. "I went to
law school to work on women's issues, to fight for access to abortion
and birth control before going into the immigration field," she says.
"We're going through the rise of the Tea Party, and there's been a
pushback on women's rights. Having worked on these issues, we're still
fighting those battles."
The Legislature has steadily and severely limited access to women's
reproductive health clinics, creating draconian rules that have forced
many operators to close their doors. On the immigrant rights front, the
battle-hardened attorney expresses disbelief at the pitch of
anti-immigrant sentiment that's swept the country over the last few
years, a backlash powerfully emblematic in the form of the
(now-shuttered) T. Don Hutto Residential Center in rural Texas –
actually more prison than refuge, for "teeming masses yearning to be
free." Thanks in part to the efforts of Hines and her students, the
center was ultimately closed.
"To see children in prison ...," she says – suddenly silent, as her
thoughts drift to the scenes she saw in the Hutto center, some 30 miles
north of Austin. "I never thought I'd see that. A child should never be
in a prison," she says of the facility where roughly half of the
detainees were children.
Hines was among the first legal representatives for Hutto detainees,
bringing (along with her legal expertise) crayons and markers to
entertain the children, as the New Yorker reported in a lengthy
March 2008 story in which she figured prominently. (The toys were
eventually forbidden when a child's portrayal of the detainees turned up
in a Canadian newspaper.) Hines helped bring a lawsuit against the
Hutto center that ultimately led to its 2009 closure. "Overall, the
Hutto case was a very important one, but took an emotional toll," she
recalls. "I spoke out at a press conference and got choked up, which was
not very lawyerly."
"Just Like Hutto"
The Hutto case for which Hines served as co-counsel was one of her
greatest legal victories. But in the years since – just months before
her imminent retirement – she's seen history repeat itself, in the
Karnes County Residential Center. The facility – this one 100 miles to
the south – was established last summer to help contain the exodus of
mostly child immigrants, arriving largely from Guatemala, El Salvador,
and Honduras. "Even though they don't have children in prison uniforms,
this is an unlicensed facility just like Hutto. It's run by a private
prison corporation just like Hutto. I've been there twice, and saw
really stressed-out children and stressed-out mothers – just like
Hutto."
As at Hutto, conditions at the Karnes County facility are hardly
welcoming to refugees. In op-eds, Hines has assailed such privately run
detention centers established under the auspices of the Department of
Homeland Security to deal with the latest influx of immigrant children.
She draws parallels to Hutto, and says the new centers are "stepping
back in history to the agency's last failed policy of detaining children
and their parents."
How to consider one's life work at the twilight of a career, as
social progress seemingly retreats? Sitting at the Cherrywood
Coffeehouse – one of her favorite haunts near her Wilshire Wood
neighborhood – Hines was in a reflective mood, wondering about a final
professional accounting: Is her cup half empty or is it half full? In
Austin legal circles, Hines is something of a living legend (former
students call her an "icon"), and her renown extends far beyond Texas.
National journalists seek out her insights – most recently for National
Public Radio, where she appeared Nov. 24, discussing President Obama's
executive order on immigration. She also frequently lectures and
publishes on topics related to immigration law and immigrants' rights, a
legal field in which she's practiced since 1975.
Out of the Dark Ages
Having left high school early, Hines took a semester in Mexico City
and first arrived in Austin in 1965, as a fresh-faced 17-year-old,
feeling empowered by the early women's liberation movement (aka the
"Second Wave"). In 1969, she earned a B.A. with honors in Latin American
studies from UT-Austin. She began law school at UT in 1972, then
transferred to Boston's Northeastern University, where in 1975 she
received her J.D. before returning to Texas. "When I started law school
in the summer of 1972, there were 10 women and 100 men," she recalls.
"When I tell my women students that, they say, 'You're from the Dark
Ages.'"
In 1996 and 2004, she was a Fulbright scholar in Argentina – stints
during which she developed an affinity to the South American country she
now regularly visits, the travels made easier by her Spanish fluency.
She focused her research there on Argentine immigration law.
Long before that, she had spent her formative years in Brownsville,
Texas, where her parents had eventually settled after escaping the
Holocaust. "They fell in love with the Mexico border," she says. Both
mom and dad are gone now, her father's death preceding his wife's
passing in 2007 by 26 years. Hines was also married for six years – "a
long time ago," she says pithily – a brief union that produced son
Justin Burchard, 33, now a data manager at D.C.- and Chicago-based Civis
Analytics, where he does political campaign analysis.
Hines' other professional accomplishments include having served as
the first co-director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law of Texas, the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project at UT Law, and a
current role on the board of directors of the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyers Guild. She's been a litigant on many
issues related to the constitutional and statutory rights of immigrants
in federal and immigration courts, exemplified by her role in the ACLU
lawsuit that eventually led to the closure of the Hutto facility. The
lawsuit against the federal government that prefaced the facility's
closing led first to an agreement mandating sweeping changes at the
detention site; Hines found herself in the national spotlight for her
work, as reflected in Margaret Talbot's March 3, 2008 New Yorker story, "The Lost Children."
"The agreement entails a number of changes at Hutto," Talbot wrote,
"including eliminating the head-count system, providing pajamas for
children, letting kids keep a limited number of toys in their room
during the day, making a priority of hiring people with experience in
child welfare, and installing curtains around toilets. ... Yet it seems
unlikely that these changes would have been made without pressure from
the A.C.L.U. lawsuit and from advocates like Barbara Hines and her
students."
Last month, Hines was awarded the Massey Award for Teaching
Excellence, "presented to a faculty member who embodies the school's
priority of providing the highest quality of teaching to its students,"
according to the UT law school's website. The award is added to a
crowded mantle of accolades, including: the 1992 American Immigration
Lawyers Association (AILA) Jack Wasserman Award for Excellence in
Litigation; the 1993 AILA Texas Chapter Litigation Award; the 2002
Texas Law Fellowships Excellence in Public Interest Award; the 2007
AILA Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award; the 2009 MALDEF
Excellence in Legal Service Award; and the 2010 National Lawyers Guild
Carol Weiss King Award. In 2000, she was named one of the 100 best
lawyers in the state, by Texas Lawyer magazine.
Changing Lives
It's those students referenced by The New Yorker – hundreds of
them, past and present – who are Hines' greatest source of pride. Over
coffee, she described with enthusiasm how she's indirectly responsible
for immigration attorneys scattered all over the country – more than
400, she reckons – who have passed through her classes or participated
in her legal clinics. Some of those students speak with reverence about
their former mentor, relating anecdotes of experiences alongside Hines
that transcend mere student-teacher interaction – that were, they say,
literally "life-changing."
Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch was one of the student attorneys who
accompanied Hines to Hutto, tasked with interviewing a family of Iraqi
Chaldean Christians who had fled their country after the patriarch had
been beaten while being held for ransom. The former student recalled
indelible memories of the family, who had first flown to South America
before traveling by bus to the San Ysidro border station, where they
presented themselves as asylum seekers. "Their months-old baby wore a
prison-issued onesie," Lincoln-Goldfinch recalls. "During our interview,
the mother asked me if I would hold her baby because she said I smelled
like the outside world; at the end of our interview, she asked if I
could sneak her baby out with me. I remember crying with some friends
that night, just baffled that our government would treat asylum-seekers
this way. This is the life-changing moment that Barbara gave me."
Lincoln-Goldfinch now works at a private practice, specializing in
immigration.
"I knew that I had found my calling, and this was an area of the law
that would interest and engage me for the rest of my career," she said.
"[Barbara]'s got this inexhaustible well of interest and respect for her
students," she added. "She cries with us when we win our cases. She is
the perfect teacher."
Erica Schommer met Hines as a second-year law student in the fall
2000 legal clinic. Intent on focusing on international human rights
policy work, she ended up completing two more semesters in the clinic,
altering her career path. "I was hooked," Schommer says. "I have now
been practicing immigration law for 11 years, and I can't imagine being
in another practice area. She helped me get my first job and has helped
countless others. There is nobody in the field I respect more."
Amelia Ruiz Fischer, an attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project,
has worked with Hines on a number of matters, including at Hutto. There
is also ongoing work related to the federal Secure Communities program,
under which the Travis County Sheriff's Office detains undocumented
immigrants at the behest of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency, suspending standard due-process safeguards. The practice has led
to the deportation of roughly 5,000 county immigrants since its local
implementation in 2009 – ironically, the same year as the closure of the
Hutto facility. "Barbara has this thing that's undeniable and not
something easily explained," Ruiz Fischer says. "It's a fire. It's this
fire she has that makes you want to be a part of it. It's contagious and
infectious. She touches people's lives."
Ruiz Fischer credits Hines with having introduced her to Jordan
Pollock, her immigration clinic partner she now calls her "professional
soul mate." Hines was there to witness her students' first legal
victory, the granting of asylum for a resident of the northeast African
country of Eritrea. "Barbara was sitting nearby," Ruiz Fischer recalled
with emotion. "The feeling of hearing the judge say that the application
was granted ... Jordan and I started crying, and then I see Barbara and
she's so happy, with tears in her eyes. I really can't say enough about
the kind of person she is, and what kind of impact she's had on my
professional and personal life."
Focusing on Victory
With her retirement imminent, Hines has taken up tango lessons, and
amplified her Hatha yoga regimen that she says has long kept her
grounded. "My parents practiced Judaism, but I'm agnostic. Yoga is the
closest to spiritualism for me." She concedes that the legal profession –
in particular a specialty like her own, centered on a vulnerable
population – can take an emotional toll. But as she ponders her
retirement, she'll adopt the same advice she's always given her
students: "You have to focus on the victories."
She mentions how energized she was in watching the June 2013
filibuster of state Sen. Wendy Davis – alongside hundreds of other
inspired women – as Davis held sway for 11 hours in her attempt to block
Senate Bill 5, the omnibus bill to greatly restrict access to abortion
care. "It was very uplifting for me," she says. "Even though we lost the
battle, it gives me hope for the next generation of women." (Davis
initially blocked the bill, but it was subsequently passed in a
special-called session.)
She's also buoyed by the heightened current interest in immigrants'
plight, a far cry from when she tried largely in vain to draw media
attention to Hutto. "There is now a whole lot of interest in the pro
bono community and in the media. I couldn't get anyone interested in
what was going on in Hutto, nobody. I was begging people to write about
Hutto."
Belying her 67 years, Hines had bounded into the coffee shop with a
youthful energy, bedecked in a colorful handmade dress woven with
flowers, a gift a friend brought back for her from Pátzcuaro in
Michoacán. After a couple of hours of coffee and conversation, a friend
arrived to coax her to a larger table across the room, where several
other friends had gathered at the end of the workday. "I feel really
lucky when I look back at my career," she said before joining her
friends. "I accomplished much more than I expected, when I was an
insecure lawyer unable to speak in public. I feel really fortunate that I
found a career this meaningful."
Watching her settle into the mix – after requisite abrazos
from those gathered – it seemed clear that, even in retirement and away
from the teaching role that has long enlivened and energized her, Hines
is going to do just fine.
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