On August 1, with seemingly no warning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement stripped detainees of their right to free phone calls – including calls to their lawyers. The news comes just a month after detainees at Costa Verde and Golden State Annex in Kern County began a walkout over unfair conditions at the centers.

Jose Ruben Hernandez Gomez, a former immigrant detained in Mesa Verde and a legal permanent resident of the United States since childhood, has experienced firsthand that these resources are available to him.

“Without these free legal services during my detention, I would not be here today. If I had not been able to reach lawyers, I would not have been able to challenge the deportation proceedings and would have been deported to a country where I would have faced great suffering and even death,” Hernandez Gomez said in a statement from the SF Public Defenders Office.

The history and context of prison phone calls go back years and began to attract attention with a specific case.

In 2013, Audley Barrington Lyon Jr., an immigrant from Jamaica, found himself in a complicated visa situation after he was injured as a bystander at a violent crime. Lyon’s cooperation with the investigation could have made it easier for him to obtain his visa.

The problem? The prison where Lyon was being held had restrictions that made it impossible for him to get the police to cooperate in his case.

Time constraints and the cost of phone calls are both ways that inmates are denied legal representation. The situation in Lyon and the restrictive phone policy prompted the ACLU to take on the case. In 2016, the case was settled and the “Lyon Pin” was created.

This PIN was used only at the Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex prisons and allowed inmates to contact their lawyers directly without paying high fees. Lawyers were given a four-digit code that allowed them to reach their clients from their housing units. The call was unmonitored and free of charge.

In addition, a program introduced during the pandemic allowed all prisoners to make up to 520 minutes of free phone calls.

In June, however, ICE ended the 520-minute phone program and, as of the beginning of the month, access to Lyon pins has also been cut off. The elimination of both programs puts detainees in an even more vulnerable position.

Inmates are held in civil detention while they attempt to obtain legal counsel or find a way to represent themselves, so access to telephone calls is an important resource for inmates.

Bree Bernwanger, attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, said the termination of both programs was completely unexpected. She said ICE notified detainees of the end of the program over the Fourth of July weekend, but that ICE did not offer alternative solutions to replace either program.

“This has constitutional implications, and ICE has an obligation to ensure that detainees have access to counsel, receive full and fair hearings, and can meaningfully consult with the counsel they retain,” Bernwnanger said. “All of these are constitutional issues at stake here that ICE’s decision to terminate access without meaningful replacement just seems to completely ignore.”

In early July, 42 prisoners in Costa Verde and Golden State Annex began a hunger strike to draw attention to the poor conditions in the prisons. This coincides with a work strike that took place a few days earlier in which 50 people refused to work because they were being paid only one dollar a day.

Their demands include closing ICE detention facilities by December 2024, fair treatment of detainees’ cases, ending solitary confinement, providing adequate health services, including non-perishable food and adequate mental health care, and resuming free phone calls.

In 2015, two attorneys visited the Mesa Verde prison and wrote a report highlighting several concerns similar to those that inmates continue to face today, including a strong focus on access to telephone calls.

Victoria Petty, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, expressed concern that inmates in detention centers face various forms of neglect and abuse. Without access to a lawyer, inmates are defenseless and have no right to legal redress.

“If they are unable to contact their lawyers to tell them what is happening, if they are unable to work productively with an attorney to evaluate the legal viability of their concerns, then the people who are being held in these private contractor facilities are being denied important access to the justice system.”

As Bernwanger put it:

“Even if they get free phone calls, people in prison are at a huge disadvantage and cut off from many of the support systems they need, including legal aid. The idea that their cases are now even more muddled, that they are now even more cut off, is something that should worry us all.”