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The activist group Human Rights Watch reported in March of 2016, two years before the border crisis exploded, that the Obama administration had a “schizophrenic” policy about migrants who flee Central America and seek asylum in the United States.
“And everything indicates that those people who seek protection still do not have a real opportunity to prepare and win their cases in immigration courts,” said Clara Long, the group's principal U.S. investigator.
Two months earlier, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in New York had reported that immigration courts issued 18,697 deportation orders to migrant children and women between July 1 2014 and December 31 2015. Out of those, 16,030 cases involved women who had no legal representation.
TRAC had previously reported that the probability that migrant mothers and children could remain in the country increased 14-fold if they had legal representation.
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