Marty Rosenbluth stood in front of his KitchenAid and poured flour into the mixer, clad in cargo shorts and a white tank top with part of a phoenix tattoo peeking out by his left shoulder. He had just returned from the Stewart county detention facility, an obscure part of the frontline of America’s immigration crisis.

As the only private immigration attorney in the tiny Georgia town of Lumpkin – and indeed the only one along the 120-mile stretch from Lumpkin back to Atlanta – Rosenbluth is always busy at Stewart. The short, wiry 59-year-old had just driven from his home-turned-office to the detention center at 7am to drop off forms to a Nepalese detainee as a favor to the man’s far-flung lawyer.

Though he has represented hundreds of detainees in his 18 months living full-time in the town near the Alabama-Georgia state line and has his own heavy caseload, Rosenbluth never turns down an opportunity to help, without charge.

His services are greatly needed. Across America tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants struggle to get effective legal representation simply because they are held in isolated, rural detention centers far from any lawyers who can represent them in person or indeed at all. Lumpkin is typical. Less than 6% of detainees in Lumpkin between 2007 to 2012 had representation, one study found. The national average for those years wasn’t much higher at 14%, according to a 2016 American Immigration Council report.

Activists say that leads to many immigration cases not being effectively heard, contributing to a national immigration crisis that sees widespread injustice to those being detained.

Rosenbluth is aiming to single-handedly change that dynamic in Lumpkin but his lone crusade is not easy. When he first moved to the town of 1,400 to work here full-time in February 2017, the detention center guards would balk when he shook his clients’ hands. They forbade him to pat their shoulders or physically greet them, claiming it was against the law.

It’s not.

But now, a year and a half later, Rosenbluth has worn them down one by one, he says, after stubbornly refusing to abide by their subjective rule changes.

But he still cuts a lonesome figure. As he enters the facility he smiles at a security guard as he passes through the metal detector and pens his name to the sign-in sheet.

‘I can save people from months and months in this hellhole … I find that very satisfying,” Rosenbluth said. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

“Look at the sign-in sheet,” he said, referring to the one for lawyers, “There’s no one there.”

Judge Randall Duncan sits in the courtroom and dials the numbers of the attorneys who represent their clients remotely. Attorneys who don’t live in Lumpkin tend not to come to town for hearings. Rather, their voices crackle from a distance over the loudspeaker.

“If someone is going to get deported or someone is going to take voluntary departure, you better have your ass in the chair next to them. I don’t care what your excuse is. I just think it’s unconscionable,” Rosenbluth said. “I think in many cases telephonic appearances are malpractice.”

Besides the nine detainees – in blue, beige and orange jumpsuits signifying the varying threat levels – Rosenbluth is the only other person taking a seat on one of the court’s benches, which are covered in words carved into the seats: El Salvador. Valentin. Nayari. Quintero. Mexico. There are dozens of other words scratched into the wood, the only visible reminder of the thousands of immigrants who have passed through this court.

This morning, Rosenbluth initially had three cases in front of the judge. However, one of his clients bonded out. The other two, both from Mexico, have asked for voluntary departure this morning, leaving on their own terms rather than being removed.

“For my clients from Mexico, I always recommend voluntary departure because if they deport you, they just drop you on the border,” he explained. “Gangs know where people get dropped off and they wait for them.”

On the plus side, voluntary departure means these men may have a better opportunity to return legally to the United States in the future. Meanwhile, deportation usually leads to multi-year entry bans.

The air is heavy, the room silent, in between the five-minute hearings per person.

Once the Spanish speaking detainees are done, two Nepalese men remain, including the one for whom Rosenbluth dropped off asylum application forms earlier in the morning. When the man hands his application over to the security guard, Rosenbluth interrupts and approaches the bench.

Walking back to the car, he explains why.

“This guy has cognitive difficulties,” he said, saying he brought the man three forms to fill out this morning, explaining he needed to submit all three to the judge. The man submitted only one so Rosenbluth jumped in to help.

Most likely, though, his intervention will make no difference.

The latest data available from the US Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review, from October 2015 to September 2016 shows Stewart’s asylum grant rate was 7% that year, with the national average at 43%.

Judge Duncan’s 2017 asylum grant rate is 2.3%.

Courts tend to take on an institutional persona, Rosenbluth added, mentioning that Stewart county detention facility is known to be one of the toughest in the nation. Including releases on bond, Rosenbluth says he’s had only a dozen victories since he started working in Lumpkin.

“It never gets any less depressing,” Rosenbluth said. “It’s just so completely unfair, unjust, illogical, [and] counterintuitive against all principles of justice.”

Rosenbluth didn’t go to law school until he was in his 40s. In fact, he dropped out of his undergraduate program at Antioch College in 1979. Then he spent a number of years as a union organizer. The rest of the 1980s, as a Jewish man, he lived in the West Bank while working on human rights issues in Ramallah.

“I spent seven and a half years under military occupation, you know, interviewing torture victims, interviewing parents whose kids have been killed by the military, interviewing people who had been shot by the military, people who had been detained for years without charge or trial,” he explained.

When he returned to the US, he worked with Amnesty International as unpaid staff and paid the bills as a videographer. He settled down in North Carolina. His wife still lives there while Rosenbluth lives in the two-bedroom house he bought in Lumpkin a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Later in the day Rosenbluth drives back to court, where now a dozen men are waiting inside Duncan’s courtroom.

A demonstrator dressed as Donald Trump protests at a rally against the separation of immigrant families outside an Ice detention facility. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

As the only attorney in the room, his client gets called first. A hearing date is set for December. He remains seated after a security guard escorts his client back to the detention facility. “I’ve heard it from other attorneys who’ve heard it from their clients that my presence physically in the courtroom makes a difference in the judge’s behavior,” he said.

An instance stood out to him that afternoon: a detainee prodded the judge, speaking through the interpreter, insisting officials from the immigration enforcement agency Ice told him he could be released on bond. The judge shuffled his papers, seemingly unsure of what to say.

That is because, very often, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) lies to people, Rosenbluth said, and just as often, Ice is itself confused about what the immigration law says.

The current extreme political climate around immigration has changed how he practices law in Lumpkin, he says. Rosenbluth has to explain to people why it is now almost impossible to win their case. He dissuades people whose cases he knows have no chance of winning, even if it means he loses out on a fee.

His point to them is this: they will be removed from the United States anyway. So save the money, he says.

But he feels no regret moving down to Lumpkin for work with so few chances of success. “I can save people from months and months in this hellhole and explain the system to them, so they don’t get ripped off. I find that very satisfying,” he said.

So satisfying, in fact, that he plans to get a third tattoo. It will be a starfish on his ankle. He begins to tell a well-worn parable as a way of summing up why he came to Lumpkin – and why he plans to stay working in this tiny, forgotten corner of America’s immigration mess.

“There was a little girl and she was walking down the beach and there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the beach,” he said “And this little girl was throwing starfish back into the ocean, one by one. And this old man comes up behind her and says, ‘Little girl, why are you bothering? You can’t possibly make a difference. You can’t save all of them.’ And she says, ‘Well, it made a difference to that one.’

“And that’s my philosophy on my work,” Rosenbluth said.