Immigrants and asylum seekers caught up in Donald Trump’s mass enforcement crackdown will at least have a better chance at knowing their legal rights – for now – after a court intervened to restore some vital advice services.
Last month, the federal government issued a stop-work order targeting programs that provide information and guidance to people facing deportation, via services such as independent legal help desks.
But the administration was promptly sued and a temporary court order was issued that restarted four programs that had been abruptly halted by the Department of Justice.
Even though short-lived, that unexpected break in legal services took its toll, after a chaotic week and a half of furloughs, cancelled detention visits and general confusion created a domino effect of inefficiencies within the US’s overloaded immigration court system.
The temporary court order restoring business as usual may be just that – temporary – as the Trump administration and its allies continue to fixate on attacking the few federal programs that secure some semblance of due process for immigrants.
“Often the people providers meet with are fleeing violence. They are just trying to protect their families and stay with their communities. They’re just trying to attend church, they’re just trying to attend school. So I don’t know in what world this makes sense,” said Kel White, associate director of learning and development at the Acacia Center for Justice, which administers the four programs targeted by the justice department’s stop-work order.
Across the US, about two-thirds of people fighting in the courts against being forced to repatriate are unrepresented. Some are behind bars in remote, isolated facilities with restricted access to the internet. And they have no right to appointed counsel, like in the criminal court system, which makes hiring an attorney a costly and often untenable prospect.
So when contracted legal service providers received the justice department’s order to pause three federally funded legal orientation programs and one legal representation program on 22 January, some of the country’s most vulnerable people lost access to their first or only touchpoints with credible legal advice.
“What we’re really concerned about is that this is perhaps more intentional and part of a broader effort to ensure that people don’t have access to information, and don’t have access to counsel,” said Laura St John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
On the ground, fallout was swift: posters with details about where to receive legal help were pulled down at detention centers. Organizations serving immigrants were denied permission to do group presentations for detainees, even on their own dime.
Vulnerable children traveling alone were no longer being assigned lawyers. And even as affected legal service providers sued for reinstatement of the programs – in a separate lawsuit from one that ultimately restored operations – some were also being forced to consider layoffs.
“Why create these inefficiencies? Why impact our communities in this way?” White asked. “These are very basic, simple programs that provide essential information about due process.”
When, for example, the Florence project gives group legal orientations to detainees in Arizona, presenters start with the fundamentals: why people are detained, what they should expect in the courtroom, and what the judge’s and government attorney’s roles are. They also describe non-citizens’ rights during hearings. Then they explain eligibility requirements for a vast array of immigration pathways – all the way up to US citizenship.
“It’s making sure people understand what’s available to them, but also when there is nothing available, which does happen with some regularity, that people don’t waste their time, effort and energy fighting for a case that doesn’t exist,” St John said.
Similarly, in Chicago, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) runs a court help desk – one of many nationwide – where people in immigration proceedings arrive knowing very little. So help desk staff do information sessions, file mandatory forms before deadlines and keep immigrants from being wrongly deported through appeals. Overwhelmed judges and court personnel often refer confused families their way.
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“Taking away the immigration court help desk, the legal orientation programs, all of this is really engineered to create the kind of chaos that will lead to unlawful deportations,” said Azadeh Erfani, policy director at the NIJC.
One of the documents the NIJC’s staffers often help to file updates someone’s outdated or erroneous court location, so that, for instance, a mother with a five-year-old child doesn’t have to drop everything and travel from Chicago to Denver for court – or worse, miss her court date and be ordered to leave the country as a no-show.
Without programs like the NIJC’s, untold numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers would probably be deported without ever seeing a judge, all because of an unfiled form.
“I think what’s lost sometimes is that people have risked their lives to get to this point,” said Adela Mason, director for two of the targeted orientation programs at Acacia. “They’ve traveled across multiple countries, often in life-threatening circumstances. People aren’t trying to evade their court date. They’ve fought for sometimes years to get before a judge and present their claim.
“And so for them to lose that opportunity … because they didn’t know that they had to fill out X form as part of asking to change their case to X city, it’s just so unjust.”
During the programs’ freeze, legal service providers got very little information from the justice department. Even now, some detention centers have delayed rescheduling visits. Legal providers are having to renegotiate to get their informational posters back on the walls, and they are still waiting for rosters to know who is new to the facilities where they are contracted for orientations.
Meanwhile, some organizations are bringing back whiplashed staff members who were just furloughed, and judges will need to reschedule court dates after missed consultations.
“We’re celebrating that we are back providing services to our immigrant community who needs those services, and to our courts who need that efficiency,” White said. “But we are living in a world of uncertainty now.”
