A dozen cities and counties—including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Oakland, and San Antonio—are set to guarantee legal representation to people in immigration court through the Vera Institute of Justice’s Safety and Fairness for Everyone (SAFE) Cities Network. As the Chicago Tribune noted earlier this week, “unlike in criminal proceedings, the federal government is not required to provide legal counsel to those without the means to hire an attorney in immigration court,” often leaving immigrants, even toddlers, with no one to represent them. This is travesty of our court system. But as Vox’s Dara Lind reports, the SAFE Cities Network stands to have truly extraordinary effects:
According to a study released Thursday by the Vera Institute for Justice (which is now helping fund the representation efforts in the other cities, under the auspices of the Safe Cities Network), the results were stunning. With guaranteed legal representation, up to 12 times as many immigrants have been able to win their cases: either able to get legal relief from deportation or at least able to persuade ICE to drop the attempt to deport them this time.
So far, cities have been trying to protect their immigrant populations through inaction — refusing to help with certain federal requests. Giving immigrants lawyers, on the other hand, seemingly makes the system work better. And if it works, it could leave the Trump administration — which is already upset with the amount of time it takes to resolve an immigration court case — very frustrated indeed. (The Department of Justice, which runs immigration courts, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Probably because they know what advocates know. “When immigrants have time to build cases, they can actually qualify for relief.” Not having an attorney plays only to the benefit of mass deportation advocates like Donald Trump, John Kelly, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who want immigrants on an assembly line to be shipped out as quickly as possible. Our immigration system is extraordinarily complicated, intentionally so, and there are some avenues for some immigrants to be able to stay here and avoid deportation all together. But they need a legal representative to guide and advocate for them.
Immigration attorney Peter Markovitz: “The idea that somebody who is not trained in the law, who may or may not be trained in English, would have the capacity to assess whether they might be eligible for asylum, or withholding of removal, or protection under the Convention Against Torture, or the Violence Against Women Act, or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status … there is virtually no layperson who would have the skills to make those assessments on their own.” Lind:
Omar Siagha’s lawyer, Andrea Saenz, figured out quickly that Siagha qualified for cancellation of removal: He had been in the US for more than seven years, and being a green card holder meant his single misdemeanor wasn’t enough to disqualify him from relief. But it would still be up to the immigration judge to actually give it to him — and so Saenz and Siagha had to persuade the judge that Siagha’s case was so compelling, and his family’s need was so great, that he was worth an exercise of favorable discretion.
“Get all the records, talk to his family, get all the dates from his original visa,” Saenz recounts. Provide evidence of his life, his close relationship with his daughter (now 8), his efforts to help his elderly mother. Document his medical history: his severe brain injury, the medications he had to take while in detention. “Get every document from every year of your life,” Saenz says, “and show the judge that you deserve it.”
It took months, but they were finally able to present what Saenz describes as “a foot-tall stack of paper put in front of us” to the judge. The courtroom was packed (the local activist group Make the Road New York had taken up Siagha’s case). And he won.
In a sense, SAFE Cities Network is serving as a pilot, and if it proves as successful as researchers and advocates hope, it could spread nationally to other cities beyond the 12 cities and counties. Lind: “Those cities cover millions of immigrants: both unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants who are at risk of losing their status. Not all of those immigrants will get detained or find themselves in need of lawyers. But the program’s supporters hope they’ll be reassured anyway: ‘I think part of the feeling of fear’ in immigrant communities, [Columbus City Council member Elizabeth] Brown says, ‘is tied to the hopelessness of defense in court proceedings.’”