A History of CALA: HOW IT came to be and where it is going

By the early 1980's, Southside's immigration program (which still is) was getting more and more pleas for help from newly arrived Salvadorans, many detained at the jail across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Sister Peggy would visit the jail and bond out those few young men for whom the church or family could pay bond Many ended up living at the church rectory with Father Bryan.

In 1980, a new law created the U.S. Immigration Courts as part of the Department of Justice. These courts were supposed to apply the new Refugee Act under which anyone fleeing persecution could seek asylum. Previously, the USA really only gave asylum to people fleeing Communist governments.

The two main asylum seeking populations that faced the new courts in the early 1980's were the people from Afghanistan and from Central America, especially El Salvador and Nicaragua. Afghanis and Nicaraguans were fleeing our traditional Cold War enemy, communism. Therefore, most of these immigrants won asylum. But almost no Salvadoran or Guatemalan won asylum in the early 1980's, despite growing proof of massive repression and killing of civilians in those countries. The Board of Immigration Appeals discounted reports of human rights violations from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as biased. The U.S. State Department said the Salvadorans were really just poor people seeking economic betterment. The Reagan Administration, which supported the military governments in Salvador and Guatemala, denied human rights abuses were widespread, or blamed them on the leftist guerrillas.

By 1984, the Immigration Courts were swamped with deportation cases for Salvadorans. There were seven immigration judges, five of whom were angry and abusive to the immigrants. There were only a small number of lawyers who knew anything about El Salvador or asylum cases since the laws were new. Most Salvadorans and Guatemalans were poor and could not afford a lawyer anyway.

Among those who had one of the earliest asylum hearings is our own friend Jose Luis Rosa,. Jose Luis had been an activist in El Salvador and had a solid basis for asylum. Anne Pilsbury had just arrived in New York to work on a civil rights case with the Center for Constitutional Rights and volunteered to help Sister Peggy with Jose's case. The hearing went on and on. Finally, The Judge  denied Jose's case, saying that even if Jose was in danger as an activist in El Salvador, he refused to grant him asylum because Jose made "several anti-American statements in this hearing" and had "admiration for nations whose political and economic systems are inimical to our own". (Jose often wore his "U.S. Out of El Salvador" tee shirt to court.)

It became clear to Anne by the mid-1980s that there were not enough progressive attorneys available to take on these asylum cases. (There were two: Bob Hilliard and Claudia Slovinsky but there were by now hundreds of people in deportation proceedings.) Anne, Sister Peggy, Claudia Slovinsky and others (including Arthur Helton who founded Human Rights First ) organized a group called CALDEC to try and locate pro bono lawyers for the asylum cases. Some came but nowhere enough for the demand. Also, the pro bono lawyers needed a lot of help and some did not speak Spanish,

As Anne and others struggled to find legal help for thousands of Salvadorans facing deportation, national press attention was focused on the "sanctuary movement" — a grassroots movement begun at the border by a few Protestant churches whose members helped Central Americans cross the border to safety. The Government was not pleased and arrested leaders of the movement. Liberal foundations quickly came up with money for their defense, prompting questions from Anne and others who asked where the funding was to defend the Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Partly as a result of this debate, the American Baptist Church v. Thornburgh lawsuit, filed in 1985 originally to protect the U.S. church workers, added a claim for the Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had been denied due process in the handling of their asylum claims. This addition would later prove to have enormous importance.

Individual deportation hearings were difficult enough but an even tougher problem was presented when Sister Peggy and other immigrant advocates noticed that one particular immigration judge in Arizona, appropriately named Judge Nail, was refusing to allow immigrants to move their cases away from the border where they had been caught to New York or Boston or Los Angeles where attorneys were available. Using Peggy's and (now then activist but he would become Immigration Judge) Bill Van Wyke's cases as examples, in late 1984 Anne filed a federal court complaint against Judge Nail ' s policy. This case, Campos v Nail, became the first class action case in the country against an immigration judge. It took ten years, but we won (we won a temporary order early on) and Judge Nail was ordered to stop his practice. He later left the bench.

Also in 1984, Anne and others, went to federal court to win the right of a detained Salvadoran woman to marry her LPR boyfriend. The wedding, which took place in the then new Varick Street detention center, captured tabloid headlines.

Anne by now had decided to stay in New York, had closed her practice in Maine, and was on staff at a small organization in Manhattan called Center for Immigrant Rights, begun by Lutheran church people. This group supported the legal defense work for about a year and half but in June 1986 decided to stop their support, leaving Anne with a huge caseload and no place to work.