By Jonathan Gramling

Due to political and economic conditions including war in the Ukraine, the sudden political change in leadership in Afghanistan and continued globalization of the world’s economy, immigrants from many different backgrounds and for different reasons have continued to put pressure on the United States’ broken immigration system that seems to change with the change in political leadership. And although the public’s focus on immigration is at the U.S. southern border, it has put pressure on systems throughout the United States.

In 2017, Dane County had the foresight to create the Dane County Immigration Affairs Office and hired Fabiola Hamden as its first director. While Hamden was its only staff member then, due to the rise in immigrants and issues posed by the broken system and hostility by some political leaders, the office now has four staff members with a fifth due to start in 2023.

There is a lot to handle.

“We have 560 open cases right now,” Hamden said of a caseload of individuals from over 50 countries. “That’s huge. Families not only need that immigration assistance, but they also need other services. Families may be coming with traumas. How do we address that if they don’t have insurance? We struggle a lot with that. We have a lot of open cases and we have to continue with them. It’s not like they come, we serve them and then that’s it. It continues. That’s why we have open cases. We have a lot of referrals from other agencies that we work with, the schools and word-of-mouth. Anyone who comes to our office or calls us receives our services as best as we can provide them.”

Immigrants come to the IAO for a number of reasons, from asylum assistance to DACA students and workers who are still in limbo to people seeking citizenship and naturalization assistance. Many of these processes are expensive and time-consuming and have strict deadlines that must be met.

The biggest wave of immigrants right now are asylum seekers, individuals who for various reasons cannot safely go back to their home countries. And they face a complex system run in a language they do not know.

“With a lot of the asylum seekers, when they come to the border, they provide them with a document,” Hamdan said. “Asylum seekers are like people who come and knock on the door of the United States. ‘Hey let me in. I’m being persecuted.’ They come and are given some paperwork and need to check with immigration offices by a certain date and say that they are here. Second, they have one year to apply for asylum. And then maybe they can apply for a work permit. But the big challenge that we have found is they come and people don’t know what the papers mean. The papers are in English and they are told they need to go to the immigration office. Some of them come and say that they are in. They made it. They are in the United States. They can go and apply. But the sad situation is it is just paperwork that says come in and see if they can get asylum. Once they come in, people are really confused. ‘Do I have rights?’ You don’t have rights until you apply. Many immigration attorneys don’t have the capacity to take cases like that because they are expensive and it takes 3-4 years for your application to be considered to become an asylee depending on your situation.”

The IAO works with a number of partners within Dane County Human Services and in the community like Centro Hispano and the Immigration Law Office. Especially with asylum seekers, there are too many people to handle individually. And so IAO has created a training program with its partners to empower the asylees as much as possible to navigate the system and be their own best advocate.

“Once per month — and we are going to increase it to twice per month — we are going to do asylum orientations at Centro Hispano with immigration attorneys,” Hamden said. “We’re going to tell them, ‘This is what it is to be an asylum seeker.’ Second, immigration attorneys from Selk see individual clients and review their case. ‘You really came from this awful situation. I think you have a good chance to become an asylee.’ Or we see cases where people were in a march in Nicaragua and now Nicaragua is doing well, so your case is very weak and they may not get asylum. Once we do the orientation and provide the meeting with the attorneys — we say that they have a good situation — they can apply themselves, it doesn’t cost money to apply for asylum. But those applications are in English. We have volunteers to help them. They start filling them out and the attorneys have to check them over. And the big part is when they have to tell their story about why they are applying. Those take a long time. They have to be in English. And then they can submit their application. Once they submit their application, after five months, they can put in an application for a work permit. I am simplifying this a lot. But it is really intense. Then we ask them to apply themselves. If you are in a bad situation, you say, ‘Sure.’ We’re trying to at least give them an orientation about what it means to be an asylum seeker. And you can do your application. The first time when you are applying, it’s free. But if you get denied, you can be deported. So it takes 2-3 years depending on their situation to go to court, fight their case and hopefully gain their asylum status. If they don’t, they are ordered to be deported. They can fight that. But without legal assistance, how do you fight in English on your own?”

And on top of this, there are DACA Dreamers who still are waiting for some pathway to citizenship.

“For DACA students, they are undocumented,” Hamden said. “So they only have permission to work for two years. They have driver’s licenses. Every three years, they have to renew their DACA. If you don’t renew it on time, your work permit will expire. If your work permit expires, the place you are working at may say that you cannot work without the work permit.”

And then there are the requests for a change in status.