PORTLAND — Two students from the University of Maine School of Law in Portland left Maine on Saturday to spend a week giving free legal assistance to women and children from Central America being held at a detention center in New Mexico.

Laura Shaw, a third-year law student from Gorham, and Amber Attalla, a second-year student from Amherst, New Hampshire, are the first legal representatives from Maine to travel to the Southwest in the wake of a humanitarian crisis along the U.S. border, according to the law school.

Their trip was coordinated by the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, a hands-on program in which student attorneys represent people seeking asylum or other protections under federal immigration law in Maine.

To cover their costs, Shaw and Attalla raised $2,500 from area law firms, attorneys, fellow law students, staff and faculty from Maine Law, family, friends, and funding from the Student Bar Association at Maine Law.

The students created a blog, http://amberandlaurainartesia.wordpress.com, to document their experiences working at the Artesia Center, located in southeastern New Mexico in the town after which it is named, about 179 miles from El Paso, Texas.

More than 66,000 parents traveling with their children have crossed the southwest U.S. border in the 11 months ending Aug. 31 — up from 12,908 over the same period the previous year, Reuters reported in September.

“The Artesia Center, located four hours from the closest major city, currently houses over 600 Central American women and children,” Anna Welch, Maine Law professor and supervisor of Maine Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, said in a news release announcing the students’ trip. “Most of these individuals fled their home countries due to conditions of extreme violence and poverty.”

Legal organizations, including the American Immigration Lawyers Association, have reported severe due process violations at the Artesia Center, according to Welch. Children as young as toddlers are being forced to defend their cases in immigration court without the help of legal counsel. In response, lawyers and law students from across the country are traveling to Artesia to provide free legal assistance to the women and children detained there.

One attorney and two paralegals coordinate with lawyers and students, according to Helen Lawrence, an attorney from the San Francisco Bay area who chronicled her time in Artesia on Oct. 27 on the New America Media website.

“Upon arrival in Artesia we met with a pro bono project crew — one attorney and two paralegals — in a community church the location of which remains confidential for safety reasons,” she wrote. “There are no legal services in Artesia. Apart from these three individuals, the only legal representation detainees have is the small teams of immigration attorneys who take turns to fly in each week from all over the country.”

U.S. asylum law requires that if detainees express a fear of return to their home country, they must be given an interview with an asylum officer, according to Lawrence. Before the pro bono project began in Artesia, the majority of the women detainees were not passing those interviews. With the arrival of lawyers, however, the vast majority of women are passing their interviews and becoming eligible to be released on bond while a petition for permanent asylum is pending.

The facility in New Mexico is run by Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, a division of Homeland Security. Lawrence wrote she met with her clients in a trailer on the grounds of the center. She and other attorneys appeared with their clients “via video conference on a television the size of my desktop computer, with lawyers and detainees seated at a small card table.

“The women we saw were mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” Lawrence wrote. “Most came to the attorney trailer for consultations with their children beside them, often having to recount horrific stories of rape, domestic violence, abuse, and other threats within earshot of their kids. As a distraction, ICE would put on a children’s video and tear out pages of coloring books and give the children crayons that they have to return when they leave the legal trailer.”

Reuters reported last month the detention centers are intended to discourage another migrant wave. March through June, when it is neither dangerously cold nor hot, have been peak months for children, either traveling alone or with their parents, to brave the journey to the U.S. border on foot and atop trains.