Concern is growing over what’s estimated to be dozens of immigrants held at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center. For the last six months, the Department of Immigration and Customs has been transferring immigrants who were detained in the continental United States to the Oʻahu facility next to the airport.
Once it became clear that the Trump administration was pursuing an aggressive immigration policy, the Refugee & Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa set up a “Deportation Defense Hotline.”
The Conversation spoke with two attorneys with the clinic to get an update on their efforts. Esther Sungeun Yoo is the director of the clinic and Pilar Kam is an immigrant advocate and a postgraduate fellow.
Kam recalled volunteering at the clinic as a student. Back then, she said a hotline wasn’t needed, though that changed once President Trump took office.
“He started coming up with these quotas, like asking that ICE and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) put as many people in detention as possible,” she said. “That put a lot of pressure on those agencies to do that, and that may be one of the reasons why we're seeing what we're seeing is just that pressure of increasing the number of immigrant detainees in detention centers.”
“Almost immediately after that executive order, that detention started happening, the arrest started happening, and all of a sudden we had this flood of phone calls of people not really knowing what to do,” Kam said. “So we set up the hotline, and now it has become a source for people to look for information and find their detained loved ones.”
ICE has reported about 150 people arrested and detained in Hawaiʻi, but the Deportation Defense Hotline has also received around 150 calls.
Yoo explained how this indicates to them that the official statistics are undercounting certain individuals affected.
“We're operating a hotline, but we're mostly acting as a service to make sure that each person who's detained knows their rights and what to expect in the process,” Yoo said. “We screen them for immigration relief, so we have a conversation with them, try to figure out their immigration situation. If they ask us or request a referral, we have a network of immigration attorneys that we know do detained cases in immigration court, and we will refer them to one of those immigration attorneys.”
Call or text the Immigration and Detention Hotline at 808-204-5951 for legal assistance.
This story aired on The Conversation on Dec. 22, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
