Within These Walls

Light from the hot afternoon sun penetrates the floor-to-ceiling windows at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond, illuminating the worship space and meeting rooms within.

Somewhere inside is Abbie Arevalo Herrera, an undocumented Honduran woman who took refuge at the church with her two children three months ago on June 19, one day after immigration authorities informed her she was to be deported.

The black double doors are locked, but a taped scrap of white paper offers a greeting:

“WE APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE IN THE CHECK-IN PROCESS.”

Around-the-clock volunteers stand guard inside the church entrance as part of a screening process meant to protect Arevalo. I knock, and within seconds, the silhouette of a white-haired woman wearing pastel capris and wire-rimmed spectacles appears on the other side of the glass. “Who are you here to see?” she asks, hands clasped behind her back, with her nose near the pane of glass. I tell her I’m meeting Arevalo’s lawyer, Alina Kilpatrick. Her head bobs tersely and without a word, she turns on her heel and walks out of sight.

A slow trickle of sweat marks five minutes passing; then 10.  Finally, the door swings open, framing a 5-foot-2 woman with a mop of auburn hair cinched together with a big clip at the nape of her neck. “Hello!” she says brightly, letting the door close behind her as she slips outside.

“I’m Alina, Abbie’s attorney. Can I see some kind of press ID, license?” She takes the cards and, after a quick examination, gives a nod to the gatekeeper and the door swings open long enough to allow both of us inside. “Welcome! Yes, please come in. Good timing. We have lots to talk about,” she says, flashing a hurried grin over her shoulder. Her feet, clad in a pair of open-toed blue pumps, begin making brisk strides down a hallway.

“I’m sure you can understand why the security measures are necessary,” she says, while pushing open a pair of yellow double doors at the end of the hall, “But we can’t be too careful, given the state of things right now.”

Kilpatrick’s client, Arevalo, is seeking asylum in the United States, afraid for her safety and that of her children if she returns to Honduras. She fled her native country with her now-11-year-old daughter in 2013 to escape a decade-long cycle of violence at the hands of the girl’s father, who has repeatedly threatened to kill her and continues to harass her through phone calls and messages.

Under the Obama administration, U.S. immigration authorities considered victims of domestic violence eligible for asylum. But that changed on June 11 — just eight days before Arevalo’s deportation order — when Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a decision saying that “generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum.” The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Aug. 7 challenging the new policy.

Caught in political and legal crosswinds, Arevalo waits for release. Spared deportation for now, she is sequestered within the walls of the church, one of the “sensitive locations” where Immigration and Customs Enforcement generally avoids making arrests.

Kilpatrick, I will learn, is also seeking a form of release as she attempts, through unrelenting legal advocacy work, to lift the weight of a family history of injustice off her shoulders.

Together, they’re in a fight for recognition — to convince the nation that domestic violence should be grounds for asylum.

RIGHTING A WRONG

Kilpatrick motions toward a small 10-by-12-foot room marked “CHOIR” on the frosted glass and “PRIVATE” on another paper sign taped to the door. Changes of clothes hang from music stands; a wall-length metal filing cabinet rests beneath a slant of skylight windows that flood the tiny room with hues of green and yellow. Kilpatrick’s gaze follows mine, landing on an inflatable air mattress taking up the majority of the remaining floor space.

“I’ve been sleeping here — well, living here — since Abbie came into sanctuary,” she tells me sheepishly.

The Spartan conditions could be seen as a form of penance.

“I still find myself trying to adjust to this lifestyle of stretching every dollar, when a year or two ago I was making $95,000,” Kilpatrick says in an upbeat tone.

A Richmond native, she grew up in South Carolina and returned to study theater at Virginia Commonwealth University before switching to a law career. Kilpatrick spent almost eight years working in a public defender’s office in Elko, Nevada, a rural town of fewer than 20,000 people, surrounded by desert. Many of her clients there were Native Americans and Latinos. She sometimes took troubled teenagers into her own home when they had nowhere else to go.

I ask what brought her back to Richmond. After a long exhale, Kilpatrick starts to explain but trips over the words, as if she’s not sure, herself. Finally she blurts out, “intuition.”

After serving as deputy and then interim public defender in Nevada, she lost her bid for appointment to the office. Then, in early 2017, the Trump administration announced a travel ban, barring entry to people from seven predominantly Muslim countries and stranding thousands of passengers around the world.

Kilpatrick pivoted to immigration law, in what she sees as her continuing effort to redeem the family name.

As editor of the Richmond News Leader in the mid-20th century, her late grandfather, James J. Kilpatrick, supplied the intellectual arguments for Virginia’s “massive resistance” to court-ordered racial desegregation of public schools. In his 1962 book “The Southern Case for School Segregation,” he wrote that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.” The success of his arguments helped perpetuate Virginia’s unequal education system and led to the closing of some schools, denying many black students an access to education for years.

Kilpatrick invoked her grandfather’s legacy in the application essay granting her entry to Howard University, a historically black institution in the nation’s capital. The tactic was risky, but it reaped reward. Arguing a moral imperative to pay reparations for the sins of her kin, Alina Kilpatrick earned a seat at the nationally ranked school’s law program, despite initially being wait-listed. Her LSAT scores were not high enough for a competitive admissions advantage, perhaps because Alina — who speaks five languages and has a mastery of word play and structuring argument — is dyslexic.

James Kilpatrick’s eldest granddaughter finds a certain irony in her present circumstances, as she pursues justice during an era similarly fraught with racial and cultural tension.

About a third of her cases as an immigration lawyer are pro bono; some receive funding through the Sacred Heart Center, which was awarded a $100,000 Impact 100 grant from the Community Foundation to provide legal services for Richmond’s  Latino community. The hours Kilpatrick puts into a case don’t seem to faze her. She plows away at appeals, only stopping for refills of the kale-and-spinach smoothies that fuel her work.

“I rely more on the fact I have more time than they do and I can outwork them,” Kilpatrick says. “I can lob more at them than they can lob back.”

A few months ago, she left her position as a senior attorney at a law firm in Northern Virginia’s Woodbridge community so she could have more autonomy over her caseload. Now, Kilpatrick sits in her choir-room-turned-office, explaining the “dirty secret of immigration law.” As she sees it, there’s a huge disparity in the quality of deportation defense. There are relatively few attorneys who know immigration law well, and demand is high.

“Deportation defense is such a money-maker because people are desperate,” she says, adding that many firms take on more cases than they can reasonably handle. In addition, she says, immigrant clients often don’t have the resources to pursue complaints about ineffective counsel.

“Abbie’s case,” she tells me, “was honestly one of the worst cases of legal work I’ve ever seen.”

Kilpatrick is the third lawyer to work on the case. She became involved in early June. A judge denied the first motion to reopen Arevalo’s case because of a technicality: The attorney had failed to send the asylum application.

Before Kilpatrick can delve further into the case, her cell phone starts buzzing. She raises a finger to signal “hold that thought” before clicking onto the call. I watch as she muddles through a five-minute call in a mix of English and Spanish. The communication barrier and cell signal present obstacles, but the nature of the call comes through clearly: A Guatemalan woman needs an attorney immediately for her deportation hearing scheduled for 9 a.m. that Thursday — two days away.

“Yes, sí. OK, I will be there,” Kilpatrick says to the woman on the other end of the line. “Arlington, Thursday, Miércoles — no, sorry — Jueves. OK, just call this number again if anything changes and I’ll see you there.”

She ends the call with a long exhale.

Then, Kilpatrick yells abruptly: “Fuck!” She spins around to look at a calendar. “Shit, fuck, oh my God!” She rifles through papers. “Oh my God. I double-booked myself. I totally forgot I have a doctor’s appointment I cannot miss Thursday morning.”

Within seconds, she’s back on the phone, frantically dialing numbers — some from memory, others not — cold-calling attorneys, some of them former colleagues at her old firm. It takes her less than 10 minutes to find someone to cover the woman’s court appearance, and as soon as Kilpatrick hears the word, she’s back on the phone with the woman — apologizing profusely and explaining the change of plans.

“Abbie’s case was honestly one of the worst cases of legal work I’ve ever seen.” —Alina Kilpatrick

The reason Kilpatrick is so quick to take on another pro-bono case: Unrepresented clients are far more likely to be deported.

Later, I find out that the doctor’s appointment Kilpatrick couldn’t miss was for a sudden, severe onslaught of stress-induced migraines.

A QUEST FOR ASYLUM

Arevalo and her two children spend their days and nights in the church basement, where Sunday school classes take place on weekends. At other times, only Arevalo’s closest friends, family and confidants are allowed downstairs.

The large, communal area of the basement functions as a living room, often scattered with stacks of books and toys. One of the playrooms serves as the family’s bedroom. Rarely is it quiet downstairs, though. Most of the women who make up Arevalo’s protective circle are mothers, and their young children have all become good friends. Sometimes the plinking of piano keys can be heard as Jamie Kilpatrick, Alina’s younger sister and the church’s accompanist, teaches Arevalo’s daughter how to play.

Arevalo’s husband, Elmer, who has permanent residency, stops by when he is not working as a roofer to take the children out with him or spend time with his wife downstairs, where smells of laundry detergent and made-from-scratch meals permeate the rooms.

The large, industrial-grade kitchen is where Arevalo seems to feel the most comfortable. When visitors enter the downstairs area, it’s almost guaranteed she’ll offer them a plate of Honduran food.

But nobody is allowed direct access to Arevalo without first being vetted by her circle, usually spearheaded by Kilpatrick, immigrant rights consultant Lana Heath de Martinez and members of ICE out of RVA. In some ways, it feels like an audition.

Two weeks after meeting Kilpatrick, on a day when she is out of town, Martinez and I sit down in child-size plastic red chairs in the upstairs church nursery to be introduced to Arevalo. Her daughter accompanies us, as do the two women’s toddler sons, who giggle in a mix of English, Spanish and babbles behind us while they play with toy cars. The meeting goes well despite the language barrier, and before disappearing downstairs to make lunch for the kids, Arevalo invites me to her 31st birthday party in August. It is some days later before I go downstairs for the first time — a rite of passage, Martinez tells me — and some weeks after spending time with the family and close friends before we meet on a Saturday evening so Arevalo can tell me her story in full.

Arevalo, Kilpatrick, an interpreter and I settle in to miniature chairs at a round table in the basement playroom.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?” Kilpatrick prompts. “When you first met.”

Arevalo was 18 years old, a devoted soccer player just about to leave for college to study dermatology, when she met Paul* for the first time. Her soccer ball had popped and he offered to fix it; such repairs were costly, so she shrugged and told him OK. He was new in town — his sister had just married a man from her village. Arevalo had no interest in marriage and told him so when they began seeing each other. About eight months later, she found out she was pregnant with their first child, the daughter residing with her at the church.

As is customary in Latin America, she moved to Paul’s village with him for the remainder of the pregnancy, now considered his wife under Honduran common law. When the couple arrived at his village, having walked the distance over the course of a day, nothing was as he had described it: The rural village was much more impoverished than her hometown; the water was filthy and only hit the taps once every three days. His whole family slept in the same room and hardly had enough to eat most days. Instead of looking for work, Paul spent his days playing soccer and at the bar feeding his alcohol and cocaine addictions.

The first time he hit her, she says, it was because his younger sister told him Arevalo had said he shouldn’t go play soccer that day. So, with his sister’s soccer cleats in hand, he beat her when she was six months pregnant.

One year, when Arevalo was planning a birthday party for their daughter, Paul went to a bar the day before the event rather than helping her sell plantains. Arevalo followed him there on foot — he had a bicycle — and said, “Let’s work today, and tomorrow we can take off to celebrate our daughter’s birthday.” He stormed out, and when she got home, he was livid.

“He was so furious because I’d embarrassed him in front of his friends,” she says, “He grabbed me by the hair and started punching me in the face in front of all my family, and no one could defend me.”

I ask if their daughter saw this, too, and her face crumples. “Sí.”

She tells me that even when their daughter was little, she knew when he was coming home drunk by the sound of dogs barking, and she’d begin shaking uncontrollably because she was scared of what to expect. When Paul tried to hit the girl once, Arevalo intervened, taking the beating instead.

“He grabbed me by the throat and he was killing me — really killing me, I was losing consciousness — but then my sister [Claudia] walked in, she was coming to visit, and she begged him to stop and he finally let go. But it was the first time I realized he would kill me.”

Arevalo says that when she threatened to report Paul to the authorities, he would laugh at the idea of being in jail and say he'd be out in 15 days or a month and take revenge, adding, “The day you think you can get me locked up, think better.”

During her second pregnancy, Arevalo decided to leave as soon as an opportunity arose.

“At that point, I realized the only way I could ever leave him would be to go to another country, because no matter where I was … he’d always come to find me,” she says.

In late 2013, after her second child’s birth, a family friend told Arevalo she was going to make what is referred to simply as “the journey” and asked if she wanted to come. Arevalo agreed. She left the baby girl with her mother, fearing the infant would not survive the trip.

“I left without looking back, because I had to leave my baby,” she says. “That was the most painful thing I’ve ever done.” She begins to sob.

Arevalo did not sleep the entire journey, terrified that human traffickers would snatch her daughter in the middle of the night. On the girl’s seventh birthday, they crossed the Mexico border into Texas. While on the Rio Grande, they were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol officers.  At that time, she gave domestic violence as her reason for fleeing Honduras and received a notice to appear in immigration court. She and her daughter were taken to a holding facility for two days, then transferred to a family detention center. When they were released to go to a shelter, Arevalo called family in the United States, who sent her bus tickets and $20, which she made last the remainder of the trip to reach relatives in Virginia.

Honduras has the highest rate of femicide in the world, according to the United Nations. A woman dies every 16 hours in a country roughly the size of Virginia, Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights reports. A 2015 report on Honduras from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council notes that “violence against women is widespread … A climate of fear, in both the public and private spheres, and a lack of accountability for violations of human rights of women are the norm.”

But for women such as Arevalo who are affected by domestic violence, applying for asylum in the United States may no longer be an option.

In his June 11 decision in a domestic violence case, Attorney General Sessions wrote, “The asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune. It applies when persecution arises on account of membership in a protected group and the victim may not find protection except by taking refuge in another country.”

David Inserra, a policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, says that Sessions' decision was necessary to preserve existing asylum and immigration laws, noting that that the number of asylum seekers has dramatically increased in recent years. “The U.S. should and proudly does help those who are persecuted, but the U.S. is not and cannot be responsible for every victim of crime everywhere in the world,” he writes in a June 14 commentary published by the foundation.

But Kilpatrick says the attorney general’s decision disproportionately affects women and children. “The feminist angle on the deportation issue is hugely underreported,” she says.

Arevalo learned of her imminent deportation at a regularly scheduled check-in meeting with ICE and Intensive Supervision Assistance Program (ISAP) officers in Northern Virginia on June 19.

Kilpatrick, her attorney, was typically present for these meetings — she was allowed to attend those where ICE was present — but she could not accompany Arevalo. Instead, Kilpatrick was arguing another pro-bono case in Baltimore involving a 3-year-old child.

Neither woman had any idea on that bright June morning how rapidly they were crossing a threshold into this uncertain place they now both reside.

Arevalo entered the church at almost midnight on June 19, just hours before she was expected to report to ICE in Northern Virginia. There, her ankle monitor would have been removed and she would have boarded a plane to Honduras, leaving behind her children and the life she built with Elmer in Henrico County.

A SHIFTING GAME PLAN

Kilpatrick jounces about the kitchen making pancakes for dinner at a friend’s western Henrico County home where she sleeps in a spare bedroom when she’s not spending nights on the air mattress at the church, paying what she can.

It’s the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right rally, and she is on “standby” in case something goes awry while grassroots groups and church members demonstrate in Charlottesville.

She wishes she could be there herself. On Aug. 12, 2017, she had been on the Downtown Mall, capturing on video a white supremacist driving his vehicle into the crowd, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer.

“Intellectually, I know that if I get arrested or hurt, there is literally no one who can cover for me,” Kilpatrick says as she sets down a plate of pancakes and maple syrup on the kitchen table. “And, not just Abbie — the others who nobody even knows about,” her voice trails off and brow furrows. “There’s literally nobody to step in.”

“The others” Kilpatrick refers to are all undocumented individuals and families facing deportation in a confusing and frequently changing immigration system.

One frequent factor in deportation orders is an issue in Arevalo’s case. She missed her initial court appearance after crossing the border, resulting in an “in absentia” order of removal. In Virginia alone, 18,670 immigration cases are marked with the designation, according to a Syracuse University database.

Why do so many people miss court when an “in absentia” case often translates into immediate deportation? Like Arevalo, many are not informed of when to appear, Kilpatrick says. “ICE gave her a Notice to Appear without a date and time on it,” she explains, referring to the slip of paper law enforcement agents issue people picked up at the border, requiring them to appear before an immigration judge. On the same slip of paper, Arevalo was given a time, date and place to report to ICE in Fairfax, which she did.

But while she provided ICE with her new address, she was not told that she needed to separately provide the address to immigration court, and could not read the text on the notice explaining that requirement, Kilpatrick says. Therefore, Arevalo did not receive notification from the court about when to appear. “When Abbie went for a check-in, ICE didn’t mention an impending court date. They didn’t have to,” she says. “This is a prime example of how our immigration system is engineered for noncitizens to fail.”

For Arevalo to be able to emerge from sanctuary at the church, she must clear a series of hurdles. Her husband, Elmer, filed a visa application on her behalf in April 2017, but Kilpatrick believes it will take 12 to 18 more months for a visa to become available. The next step would be filing two separate waivers arguing that her removal to Honduras would cause Elmer extreme hardship. If those are approved, she would have to return to Honduras for a medical exam and an interview with the U.S. State Department to screen her for threats to national security. That process can take six weeks to six months, Kilpatrick says.

Meanwhile, Kilpatrick will continue efforts to reopen Arevalo’s case, arguing that her “in absentia” deportation order is invalid, based on a June 21 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a notice to appear must include a time and place.

Another option is for a U.S. senator to file legislation that would allow her to “skip to the end and give her a green card.”

After Arevalo’s arrival at the church, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner’s office expressed interest in her case. Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Warner, says the senator sent a letter to ICE requesting a stay of deportation for Arevalo, but it was denied. She says she’s not aware of plans to introduce legislation on Arevalo’s behalf.

For now, Arevalo and Kilpatrick continue to play an anxious waiting game.

LIGHTS IN THE SKY

On July Fourth, Arevalo’s 11-year-old daughter is jittery with excitement to see the fireworks across the street at Byrd Park, pleading with her mother to come with her so they can watch the sky light up in red, white and blue together as a family. In the two weeks since settling in at the church, not even the children have gone outside. But Arevalo can’t risk leaving the building. If she does, her ankle monitor could alert immigration authorities, and ICE agents might swoop in.

The girl becomes increasingly distraught as the day wears on, and finally Arevalo turns to family friend Carlos Bernate, asking if he’ll take her. Pouting, the girl walks toward the park with him, glancing over her shoulder toward her mother and stepfather, who are inside the church, peering through the glass walls of the sanctuary at the festivities and the blue police lights speckling the streets.

Silently, the 11-year-old watches the display of lights and happy families gathered on blankets, still upset that she can’t share the experience with her parents and little brother. Inside the church, Arevalo becomes anxious at the thought of being seen in the window by police, so she and Elmer retreat to the basement. With smoke from the grand finale lingering in the air, Bernate returns with the girl, who begins to cry as she wraps herself in her mother’s arms.

Arevalo strokes her daughter’s head, just as she did a few years ago, sitting on the cold cement inside a Border Patrol facility in Texas. The two had not eaten in a week, and with barely enough room for them to squat down together, Arevalo held her daughter close, telling her, “It will be OK, we will be OK.”

---

*To protect Arevalo's family in Honduras, Paul's real name was not used.

‘A Higher Law’

Churches act to shield people who are at risk of deportation

The path to Abbie Arevalo Herrera’s stay at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond was in large part cleared by Lana Heath de Martinez.

An itinerant preacher and graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary, Martinez is a policy advocate who lobbies for immigrant-rights groups during the General Assembly, but her involvement in sanctuary work is also personal.

Six years ago, while she was pregnant with their first child, her husband was undocumented and facing a charge in traffic court. For undocumented immigrants, even a simple traffic stop can mean facing deportation proceedings. Fortunately for him, the judge imposed a fine, directed him to go to driving school and released him with a warning: Next time you’re out of here.

The present sanctuary movement revives the practice of offering safe harbor to Central American refugees in the 1980s, when federal policies aligned against undocumented immigrants fleeing civil conflict from obtaining asylum. The current network comprises a dozen congregations spanning 10 faith traditions.

An immigrant rights consultant, Martinez spearheaded efforts to mobilize the Central Virginia Sanctuary Network in 2017 while employed as “welcoming all coordinator” for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy — which she left in July — but her work in the church sanctuary movement began years earlier.

Through grant money from the Presbyterian Church USA’s Office of Immigration Issues, Martinez began organizing advocacy training sessions at different places of worship.

By 2015, the Presbyterian Church was largely underwriting the sanctuary movement revival’s momentum, and the pace accelerated after the 2016 election, Martinez says.

“We started convening activist meetings and decided to broaden the scope — we needed the [Latino] community, African-American community, Muslim, LGBTQ, everybody,” she says. “What we realized was missing were services, resources and protection.”

Martinez studied the policies and practices of earlier movements carefully as she crafted the tenets of the Central Virginia Sanctuary Network, also traveling around the region and state to conduct workshops. Often accompanying her to deliver “know your rights” lectures was Alina Kilpatrick, an immigration lawyer who had met Martinez through her work at the state legislature in 2017.

Three houses of worship in the network are prepared to accept individuals and families into sanctuary. In addition to First Unitarian Universalist, there are two in Charlottesville: a Quaker meeting house and an Episcopal church.

For the Richmond church, the decision to offer sanctuary was prefaced by activism surrounding policy during the Obama administration regarding the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, heightened when the Trump administration announced an end to the DACA program, which protects young, undocumented immigrants from deportation and allows them to obtain a work permit, a driver’s license and in-state tuition.

Before and after his election as president, Donald Trump promised to crack down on illegal immigration by erecting a border wall, among other methods — an issue that won him widespread support among political conservatives.

 “So all that precluded our thinking about the question of sanctuary, which we felt was a moral question. We still do,” says Jeanne Pupke, the senior minister at First Unitarian Universalist. “We felt there was disrespect for human beings, there was a lack of compassion and there was a fantasy that somehow we were going to deport 11 million people who are integral to our communities and our economy.” Even so, the yearlong process of deciding to become a sanctuary space was delicate, and Pupke says the church held 29 meetings to address concerns among the congregation.

“One of the main questions that came up was, ’Is it legal?’ ” Pupke says, “and what I told them is, ’It’s not within the law and it’s not subject to the law — it’s subject to a higher law.’ ”

The nearly 1,000 participants who signed on within the last year to volunteer for the Central Virginia Sanctuary Network represent not only the participating congregations, but secular counterparts including the grassroots Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and New Virginia Majority. Network volunteers provide transportation to and from Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins and visits to detention centers to see loved ones, and, through a hospitality team, keep Arevalo’s family supplied with food and other items. The network also has a legal defense fund, of which Kilpatrick has received the largest sum thus far — $3,500 — for Arevalo’s case. Of that amount, all but $750 was used to pay interpreters, Kilpatrick says.

Separately, the church oversees security volunteers and the activist groups ICE out of RVA and Democratic Socialists of America provide interpreters and assist with a #HandsoffAbbie social media campaign.