Dora Galacatos ’96, executive director of the Feerick Center for Social Justice, shared with Bloomberg Law how Fordham Law worked with the Dilley Pro Bono Project in Dilley, Texas, to provide legal services via phone to detainees.
The difficulties faced by pro bono organizations in reaching and helping clients remotely are challenging, but not unprecedented.
For instance, Fordham Law School last year inaugurated a pilot to provide remote legal services to asylum-seeking women and their children detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
The idea, said Dora Galacatos, executive director of Fordham Law’s Feerick Center for Social Justice, was to develop a way to “deal with surges in detainees, and also overtime to address the needs of rare language speakers.”
The correctional institution has strict security and does not allow videoconferences, so Fordham worked with the Dilley Pro Bono Project to recruit Spanish-speaking lawyers and legal assistants across the country to interact with detained women via phone. After assessing data on the program’s effectiveness last year, organizers are planning to restart the program in the spring.