New York Times
By Kirk Semple
June 6, 2014
The
Obama administration said Friday that it was starting a program to
provide lawyers for children facing deportation as it scrambles to deal
with the soaring number
of unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the border from Mexico.
Under
the plan, the federal government will issue $2 million in grants to
enroll about 100 lawyers and paralegals to represent immigrant children
making their way through
the immigration court system.
“We’re
taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the
rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General
Eric H. Holder Jr. said
in a statement. “How we treat those in need, particularly young people
who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing
violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we
are as a nation.”
Administration
officials have been trying to cope with a surge of unaccompanied
children that has overwhelmed border officials as well the nation’s
family and immigration
court systems. The initiative announced Friday is intended to help
children under the age of 16 who have already received a court notice to
appear for deportation proceedings but are not in the custody of the
federal government, officials said.
Since
October, more than 47,000 children traveling without parents have been
caught trying to cross the southwest border, a 92 percent increase over
the same period last
year. Most are coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,
officials said.
The
administration has ordered federal emergency authorities to coordinate a
multiagency response to the relief effort, and officials have opened
two emergency shelters
on military bases to house as many as 1,800 youths.
Conservative
critics have tied the recent surge of young immigrants to what they
view as the Obama administration’s lax enforcement of immigration law.
Messages seeking
comment on Friday from prominent congressional critics of the
administration’s immigration policies were not returned.
Immigrants’ advocates said the initiative was long overdue and extremely welcome.
In
criminal court, defendants who cannot afford a lawyer have the right to
counsel at the government’s expense. But nothing in the law provides
such a benefit in immigration
court, not even for children, and immigration law in general provides
few protections specifically for minors. According to a report released
in February by Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit group that matches
unaccompanied minors with volunteer lawyers,
and the University of California Hastings College of the Law, a
majority of minors who appear in immigration court do not have lawyers
representing them.
Immigrants’
advocates have long pressed for a federally funded public defender
system for unaccompanied minors facing deportation and have redoubled
these calls amid the
recent influx of young people from Central America.
But
even while applauding the new initiative, advocates pointed out that at
best it would only touch a fraction of all the unaccompanied minors
expected to appear in court
in the coming months. Besides the tens of thousands of children under
the age of 18 already in deportation proceedings, federal officials
predict that at least 60,000 minors will try to cross into the United
States without their parents this fiscal year.
“A
hundred lawyers nationwide is not going to satisfy our commitment to
protecting these children,” said Jonathan Ryan, the executive director
of the Refugee and Immigrant
Center for Education and Legal Services, or Raices, a nonprofit group
in San Antonio. “If we have to give lawyers to murderers, then perhaps
we should give them to refugee orphans.”
When
children go to court alone, Mr. Ryan said, the scene that unfolds can
be comically tragic, with preschoolers propped in leather-cushioned
chairs facing off against
federal lawyers. “Some of these children don’t even know where they
are, or where they’re going,” he said.
Some
lawyers said it was particularly difficult to find lawyers with the
highly specialized skills needed to represent such children and warned
that unless the participating
lawyers were already experienced in the field or received intensive
preparation, the program might not achieve its goals.
“They
may be well meaning, but they can’t do it with an hour’s training,”
said Lenni Benson, a professor at New York Law School and the director
of Safe Passage Project,
which works with volunteer lawyers and law students to provide
representation for unaccompanied immigrant minors.
The
new initiative is a collaboration between the Justice Department and
the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency
that operates the AmeriCorps
national service program.
In
their public statements on Friday, federal officials did not draw a
causal effect between the recent surge of young immigrants who had
entered the country illegally
and the initiative, instead emphasizing that the program was a
byproduct of a congressional directive to the Justice Department last
year to better serve children in immigration court.
“The
program has been in the works for a really long time,” said Samantha Jo
Warfield, a spokeswoman for the community service corporation. But, she
added, “it’s consistent
with the administration’s efforts to provide a comprehensive response
to the influx.”
The
money will be distributed in the form of grants to nonprofit
organizations in 29 cities with large immigrant populations. Those
groups would in turn recruit and enroll
the lawyers and paralegals for the program.
Each
participant will be asked to commit to about a year of service and in
exchange will receive a stipend of up to $24,200 and an award of about
$5,700 that can be used
toward tuition or to pay down educational loans.
Federal
officials said they anticipated that about 10,000 unaccompanied
children would appear in immigration courts in the 29 cities that are
the initiative’s geographic
focus.
Responding
to advocates’ concerns, officials said that qualified organizations
would be able to ensure that their lawyers and paralegals were adept in
the intricacies
of immigration law for juveniles. In addition, participants will
receive additional training during a multiday workshop around the end of
the year.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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