Psychologist Claudia Lisbet Aguilar Lara speaks recently at an Olneyville church with a family member of an alleged illegal immigrant.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

Nearly two weeks after federal agents arrested dozens of suspected illegal immigrants who clean the state’s courthouses, lawyers are still not sure where all of the detainees are being held.

The volunteer lawyers from Rhode Island and Massachusetts said that, based on anecdotal reports, they also believe there may be three or four more detainees than the 31 people U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it arrested.

Attorneys from Greater Boston Legal Services, Catholic Social Services in New Bedford and a number of Rhode Island private-practice attorneys last week filed a flurry of bond motions to prevent detainees from being moved to other states.

“Often we find ourselves in firefighting mode,” said Alison Foley, a Central Falls attorney handling some of the cases. “It’s hard because they keep moving people around, and we have to stay on our toes and run around and hustle, it seems.”

Foley said while she and other attorneys “are not giving up” on locating everyone, “we’re trying to make the most effective use of the resources we have. It doesn’t seem to be best use of our resources [to be] calling all over the country to see if they’re there.”

The raid occurred on July 15, when immigration agents and state police detectives swept through six state courthouses, arresting 31 maintenance workers on suspicion of being in the country illegally. U.S. Attorney Robert Clark Corrente said the monthlong federal-state investigation leading to the arrests stemmed from a court clerk’s tip that someone was trying to photocopy an identification card at the J. Joseph Garrahy Judicial Complex.

As the arrests were under way, a 27-member governor’s advisory group monitoring implementation of Governor Carcieri’s recent executive order on illegal immigration was midway through its first meeting. Carcieri and Col. Brendan Doherty, superintendent of the state police, were present.The detainees, from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Brazil, all face non-criminal charges (what ICE calls “administrative charges”) of being in the country illegally. To date, no criminal charges have been brought.

Meanwhile, the Carcieri administration on Friday terminated all its contracts with TriState Enterprises and Falcon Maintenance, for whom the detainees worked. The two companies held close to 50 executive branch contracts to clean more than four dozen state government buildings.

Department of Administration Director Jerome Williams said he decided to terminate those contracts after an internal review found the companies had been reporting many fewer employees to the Department of Labor and Training than they had told the state they had available. Other irregularities included that neither company has produced requested evidence that they had enrolled in a federal E-Verify program for confirming a prospective employee’s work eligibility, though both told the state they had.

As of Friday, several detainees have apparently been released on bond, but because legal aid is coming from multiple sources, it is difficult to ascertain how many people remain in detention. Paula Grenier, Boston ICE spokeswoman, was unable to provide that figure on Friday.

According to Grenier, 12 of the 31 detainees were immediately released after the raid on humanitarian grounds, including those who are primary caregivers in a family. The other 19 were sent to various regional detention facilities that ICE declined to identify, because that is “too sensitive” an issue, as one ICE official said. ICE also has not released names of its detainees.

Absent that information, volunteer attorneys drew up their own lists based on interviews with family members of detainees, and in turn, detainees they were then able to locate at the Donald W. Wyatt Center in Central Falls and at the Essex County facility in Danvers, Mass.

Then last week, ICE began moving detainees from one facility to another.

John Wilshire, lead attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, said his office managed to prevent six detainees from being moved to Pennsylvania on Tuesday. The six had already been moved from the Essex County detention facility to the South Bay facility in Boston.

When lawyers from his office caught up with those detainees at South Bay, “they told us they had been prepared to go — their belongings were packaged to go to Pennsylvania,” said Wilshire. The move was supposed to occur in the middle of the night, Wilshire said.

Wilshire’s office filed bond motions for five of the six (another had sought a private attorney), “and then the next morning we called and they hadn’t moved them. We were really happy.” He expected all six will be released.

Wilshire said a national fund established after last year’s raid at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory in New Bedford —– during which 362 people were initially detained — will help pay some of the bond money.

“The families have to come up with at least half the money,” said Wilshire, and the fund will pay the rest so the detainees “can have their day in court.” He said the bond amounts typically range from $3,500 to $5,000.

Ondine Sniffin, an attorney with Catholic Social Services in Fall River, said she has gone on “several wild-goose chases,” driving from one Massachusetts detention facility to another in the search for detainees, and spent equally fruitless hours on telephone calls.

“As far as I know, there are some people still missing,” Sniffin said. “I think we have more names than what we’ve been told, and if that’s the case then those extra names are still being held. We seem to have maybe about thirty-five.”

She said duplicate names or aliases may account for the disparity, but that remains unclear.

“It really is crazy how this works. If we don’t step in and start pushing some buttons and start making some noise they just do what they want,” Sniffin said of ICE. She credits bond motions filed by attorneys and media publicity with preventing some of the moves.

“There was one person at Wyatt who, we were under the impression, was going to Bristol [the Bristol County House of Detention in North Dartmouth]. It turned out she was never moved. Was she never moved because we started making noise?” she asked rhetorically.

Sniffin added, “Their excuse [for moving detainees] is always bed space, but if you look at the big picture — it looks to be their tactics with attorneys. It’s harder for us to locate them, harder for us to say, ‘I represent this person held at this facility.’ If we can’t say where they’re being held, then we risk having papers bounced out of court. That benefits the government, who can move them out of jurisdiction.”

And that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for lawyers, to keep track, and detainees get lost in the system, she said.

Meanwhile, at St. Teresa of Avila Church in Providence’s Olneyville section last week, a volunteer psychologist and physician who work for the Mexican government met with detainees who were released the night of the raid.

Claudia Lisbet Aguilar Lara, a psychologist, and Dr. Sonia Anahi Mendoza, a general practitioner, both work for the Secretaría del Migrante in Michoacán state. They travel in a mobile medical van to treat migrant workers in remote areas of Mexico.

Francesca Tornes was among those who met with them. She told them she cannot sleep, and feels overwhelmed.

“I keep thinking about the children,” she said through an interpreter.

Tornes’ 6-year-old daughter, Lupita, also complains of feeling unwell, and often asks: will her mommy be sent home to Mexico? Tornes also has a 1-year-old son, Jesus.

“Definitely, the human body lives in harmony with the emotions,” said Mendoza, who expected to hear about physical complaints — gastritis, insomnia, headaches — tied to depression. Aguilar Lara, the psychologist, said, “First, we need to identify what their emotional state is, and hopefully they will leave with more insight as to how they can prepare for the future.”

Advocacy group leaders said they have begun fundraising efforts for the detainees and their families.

kziner@projo.com