The National Immigration Detention Hotline that was shut down by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just weeks after it was featured in the final season of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black has been restored. Freedom for Immigrants (FFI), a California-based immigrant rights group, announced that the United States District Court for the Central District of California has granted its application for a preliminary injunction and ordered ICE to restore its hotline Tuesday. Created in 2013, the hotline allowed immigrants in custody to not only connect with their families, but find legal resources and report physical and verbal abuse. It was shut down by ICE Aug. 7; FFI filed a federal lawsuit in December to have the free and confidential hotline reinstated.
“For too long, ICE has censored our speech and invented imaginary rules to terminate our programs. Today, the court saw through this farce and restored our national hotline,” Christina Fialho, co-founder and executive director of FFI, said in a statement Tuesday. “This case should remind us all that the Trump administration is not a law unto itself, but rather accountable to the people and our Constitution.”
While ICE regulations allow detainees to make free calls to legal providers on an approved list “for the purpose of obtaining initial legal representation,” ICE told FFI that toll-free numbers for pro bono attorneys and organizations must be approved by the Executive Office for Immigration Review and that those not on the list are removed from the system. A representative added that the hotline had been removed for violating telephone rules, including connecting detainees to family members in three-way calls. FFI then filed a complaint in court alleging that ICE shut down the hotline in retaliation for the nonprofit’s exercising of the First Amendment. The complaint was accompanied by a letter of support in partnership with 121 organizations.
Judge André Birotte ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop any “further interference with the operation of the free and confidential” hotline and to restore it in all facilities operated and controlled by ICE, FFI said in a statement. According to Judge Birotte, “FFI has shown that its speech was a substantial and motivating factor behind DHS’s shutdown of the Hotline.”
Staffed by trained multilingual advocates nationwide, FFI’s is the largest immigration detention hotline in the country. When in operation, the hotline "received up to 14,000 calls per month from people in immigration detention who were isolated and suffering serious abuses,” Fialho said in a statement last year. The nonprofit’s hotline has provided services in more than 80 different languages to immigrants from 148 countries.
FFI’s national hotline director Cynthia Galaz expressed the organization’s excitement to answer calls again. She emphasized that “ICE has indicated it intends to destroy complaints from detained people about abuses and medical neglect,” and the hotline will combat this by recording abuse and evaluating stories. FFI shared the announcement on Twitter along with a Report on Hate, which the organization said was only possible to compile because of abuses reported through the confidential hotline.
The restoration of the National Immigration Detention Hotline is a win for all immigrant communities and goes to show that immigrants should not and will not be silenced.