The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti reports that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has plans to “temporarily” halt the Legal Orientation Program (LOP) and the immigration court’s “help desk,” legal assistance programs that have been lifelines for thousands of immigrants in detention and facing deportation—and yet another strong-armed effort to stomp on due process for immigrants. This is why Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III continues to put up with abuse and humiliation from Donald Trump:
Officials informed the Vera Institute of Justice that starting this month it will pause the nonprofit’s Legal Orientation Program, which last year held information sessions for 53,000 immigrants in more than a dozen states, including California and Texas.
The federal government will also evaluate Vera’s “help desk,” which offers tips to non-detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings in the Chicago, Miami, New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio courts.
According to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), the plans are “a deliberate attempt to eliminate due process from the deportation process,” and come as Sessions is also instituting a new quota system for immigration judges upping the number of cases that must be completed in a year, a decision that has already been slammed by a former immigration judge Bruce Einhorn as “an affront to judicial independence.”
“Through LOP,” NIJC notes, “legal service organizations provide basic information to men and women in immigration jails about the detention and deportation process. The goals of the bipartisan program are to improve judicial efficiency and help immigrants in detention without attorneys navigate the immigration court process. Today, LOP services reach 40 detention facilities and over 50,000 detained people in desperate need of legal services.”
The DOJ’s action is designed to be devastating. While defendants in the criminal justice system are provided an attorney if they cannot afford one, immigrants in immigration court are not. When immigrants have legal aid, they are more likely to be able to stay. “LOP staff are quite literally the last and only line of defense for detained individuals trying to understand how to represent themselves in their claims to asylum and other forms of protection in immigration court,” NIJC said.
Unsurprisingly, the administration’s excuses for ending the programs don’t pass the laugh test. An official claimed that the halt is to “examine the cost-effectiveness of the federally funded programs,” and “that immigration judges are already required to inform immigrants of their rights before a hearing,” but Vera cited a 2012 DOJ study that concluded the LOP saved the government nearly $18 million over one year, and Sessions now wants to place more of a burden on already-overwhelmed judges and immigration court.
“Without LOP, the court system will be less fair, less efficient, and more expensive,” said American Immigration Lawyers Association’s (AILA) Benjamin Johnson. “Cases will move more slowly and more people will be held in detention for longer periods of time, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. The termination of this vital program is the latest in a series of new policies and announcements from DOJ that are nothing less than an assault on due process and fundamental fairness.” Additionally, NIJC notes “terminating the LOP and help desk programs is an affront to Congress”:
The report language accompanying the 2018 omnibus spending bill, passed only two weeks ago, explicitly requires the Executive Office for Immigration Review to “continue ongoing programs”; adopts language in the House Report providing that funding “sustains the current legal orientation program and related assistance, such as the information desk pilot”; and adopts language in the Senate Report noting the need for expanded LOP services in remote immigration facilities.
“Ending the LOP is short-sighted and benefits no one,” said AILA’s Karen Lucas. “LOP is a critical resource for detained immigrants in a complex immigration court process that does not include government provided counsel. Studies have conclusively shown that LOP reduces the days people spend in detention and saves immigration judge and court time because noncitizens better understand the immigration system and whether they are eligible for relief. It is already far too rare for immigrants to receive a fair day in court as our laws and values require. LOP is the bare-minimum we can do improve access to information. They must be continued, or we all lose out.”