Immigration lawyer recounts a conversation with Obama over the border crisis that 'shook him to his core'

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U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas.

• A lawyer who works with immigrant communities in the southern US argued that the current fallout over the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy is an extension of practices carried out by the Obama administration.
• R. Andrew Free recounted a 2015 exchange he said he had with President Barack Obama, during which Free said he implored Obama to close two detention centers in southern Texas, out of concern for the immigrant women and children being held there.
• "It's wrong. And it's going to be a stain on your legacy," Free recalled telling Obama.
• The lawyer said Obama's response, as he remembered it, "shook me to my core."

An immigration lawyer sought to add some context to the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy currently drawing criticism because it has caused children to be separated from their parents when families cross the US-Mexico border illegally.

Free argued that the fallout from the sounds and images seen from locations along the southern US border, and from detention centers where migrants are being held, are an extension of practices that began under President Barack Obama.

The lawyer recounted a 2015 exchange with Obama, during which Free said he implored the president to close two detention centers in southern Texas, out of concern for the immigrant women and children being held there.

Those detention centers, located in the southern Texas communities of Dilley, and Karnes City, were opened as part of the Obama administration's effort to house the migrants who had reached the US from Central America seeking asylum from the ongoing violence in that region.

On Monday, Free recalled the conditions he witnessed at the detention centers where some of the women and children were held.

"I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should 'drink water,'" Free said. "I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers."

Associated Press

Migrants wait for access to request asylum in the US, at the El Chaparral port of Entry in Tijuana, Mexico, Monday, April 30, 2018.

Free said he brought up those camps during his brief face-to-face with Obama in 2015: "It's wrong. And it's going to be a stain on your legacy," Free recalled telling the president. The lawyer said Obama's response, as he remembered it, "shook me to my core."

"He stopped moving on to the next person in the rope line and looked back at me. I'd gotten his attention," Free said. "He turned back, looked at me and [asked], 'Are you an immigration lawyer?'" "Yes," Free replied.

Free reasoned that Obama was of the belief that only immigration attorneys cared about asylum-seekers being held in US detention - an apparent byproduct of a deal struck between the Obama administration and the Corrections Corporation of America, which had received a four-year, $1 billion government contract to build facilities to hold women and children seeking refuge in the US.

The lawyer also argued that Obama saw the DACA program - which gave undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children freedom to seek authorization to live and work here without fear of deportation - as a big enough win that the detention centers wouldn't blip the political radar.

The part that Free said "shook me to my core"

Free recalled Obama's response to his suggestion that the detention centers would tarnish his legacy.

"I'll tell you what we can't have," Obama said, according to Free. "It's these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk."

In his comments on Monday, Free said he interpreted the president's remarks as an argument for treating the migrant holding facilities as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

Members of the Trump administration have avoided that characterization in recent days, but some Trump appointees, including White House chief staff John Kelly and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have explicitly acknowledged that goal.

Free said the logic of detention as a deterrent to illegal immigration ignores the reality that US-bound migrants are fleeing violence in Central America because they believe they have no other options.

As Free put it, the deterrence argument "assumes a parent would rationally [choose] to watch her daughter raped or murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras instead of helping her flee to seek the domestic and international legal protections of US law."

He went on: "People in the Northern Triangle were (and are) fleeing for their lives. They're looking to what we've held out as a shining city on a hill and following the beacon to safety."

"To convince them not to flee, you must convince them a worse fate awaits at the end of the journey."