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Monica Hernandez, 10:44 p.m. CDT October 6, 2014
wwwltv.com

NEW ORLEANS – With a surge of unaccompanied, undocumented children arriving in the U.S. this year, a record number ended up in Orleans and Jefferson parishes.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, more than 830 unaccompanied minors were released to sponsor families in Orleans and Jefferson parishes between Jan. 1 and the end of August.

More than 1,400 undocumented minors have been released to families in the state of Louisiana while they await immigration proceedings.

"We used to get maybe five to 10 calls about these types of cases. Then we started getting 100 calls a month about these types of cases," said Homero Lopez, Jr., supervising attorney for Catholic Charities of Baton Rouge, which is working with Catholic Charities of New Orleans to provide support for sponsor families.

"They're fleeing narcoterrorism, they're fleeing extreme poverty and they're fleeing threats to their life," said immigration lawyer Kathleen Gasparian, managing partner at Ware Gasparian.

Many unaccompanied minors in the metro area escaped violence in Honduras, and federal immigration officials placed them with sponsor families, often relatives, in the metro area, said Gasparian. Jefferson Parish in particular has a large Honduran population.

The unprecedented surge created a pressing need for more immigration attorneys to help undocumented minors navigate the legal system, and that's why Gasparian created PB and J NOLA at the end of July.

"It is a project to train non-immigration attorneys to handle immigration cases for children who have come to the U.S. unaccompanied," said Gasparian. "We realized the problem was much bigger than not just our firm but much bigger than all of the immigration attorneys here in the New Orleans area. We really needed the community to come together to make sure all of these kids got due process."

Since last month, PB and J, or the Pro Bono and Juvenile Project, paired about 60 attorneys with the most vulnerable of the unaccompanied children: those who had been neglected, abandoned or abused. Attorneys won't charge for their work, and neither will the interpreters helping them.

"There are basic challenges in that we do not have a lot of Spanish speaking attorneys in the New Orleans area, and the basic communication between attorney and client becomes complex when you have to do it in another language," said Gasparian.

The cases could take months to work their way through the court system. Gasparian said the immigration court in New Orleans had a backlog of thousands of cases even before the unprecedented surge began.

"We've identify the first couple needles in the haystack. This is going to be an ongoing process just to get through the first round of kids," said Gasparian.

Catholic Charities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge are working to identify the children who can be paired with attorneys.

http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/loca...kids/16841837/