TIME
By Alex Altman
August 11, 2014
For
the 1,071 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the southwest border
this year and ended up in Louisiana, the path to a future in the U.S.
runs through a courtroom
on the 24th floor of an office tower in the heart of New Orleans.
Here,
past the heavy doors and security guards, a rotating detail of judges
determines the fate of the immigrant children streaming across the
border and into the state.
As they arrive in record numbers, the New Orleans Immigration Court is
buckling under the strain.
During
the first six months of 2014, the court has taken on 450 juvenile
immigration cases, according to government records obtained by Syracuse
University’s Transactional
Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). That number puts the court on pace
to shatter last year’s total of 540 cases. Three years ago, it had 71.
New
Orleans’ struggle is part of a pattern. Nationwide, immigration courts
have become choke points in the border crisis. Overburdened and
underfunded, they are sagging
under the weight of the new arrivals, with enormous case backlogs and a
lack of attorneys able to perform work that must often be pro bono, or
without charge.
At
the end of June, the number of cases pending in U.S. immigration courts
had climbed to a record high of 375,503, according to data amassed by
TRAC. The largest backlogs
are in states with the biggest immigrant populations, such as
California and Texas, which have also received the greatest number of
unaccompanied minors.
But
as stressed as those states are, legal activists say the situation is
worse in places where the number of immigrants may not be quite as high,
but where there’s a
shortage of lawyers able to represent a spiking population.
New
Orleans is a prime example. The large number of Honduran immigrants
resident here has made the Crescent City a magnet for kids fleeing the
skyrocketing violence in
the troubled Central American country. Over the past year, few cities
have absorbed more unaccompanied kids than New Orleans. Yet the entire
state of Louisiana has only about a half-dozen nonprofit immigration
lawyers devoted to serving them, says Jennifer
Rizzo, national pro bono promotion counsel for Human Rights First.
As
a result, children are regularly summoned to complex legal proceedings
that will shape their future without any legal representation. At the
end of June, New Orleans
Immigration Court had a total of 1,216 pending juvenile immigration
cases. In 991 of them—81%—the child has no lawyer. Overall, 87% of
immigrants detained in the state lack an attorney, according to a study
by Human Rights First.
“Things have reached a crisis point,” Rizzo says.
Legal
representation may be the single largest factor in determining whether
an undocumented immigrant wins the right to remain in the U.S. According
to TRAC’s analysis
of 100,000 case records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA), immigrant children represented by an attorney are deported by
presiding judges about half the time. In cases when juveniles went
without an attorney, the success rate for sidestepping
deportation was just one in 10.
“There’s
a likelihood that these kids don’t know how to obtain legal
representation, because nobody speaks English,” says Hiroko Kusuda,
whose law clinic at Loyola University
in New Orleans is one of just three listed service providers in the
state. “If they don’t have legal representation, the chances of them
getting relief from deportation is close to zilch.”
Kathryn
Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s Executive Office
for Immigration Review (EOIR), said in an email that EOIR provides
interpreter services
for immigrant children for whom English is a challenge. But she
acknowledged that some go without a lawyer. “Children are not guaranteed
representation in immigration court proceedings, but all respondents
have a right to representation at no expense to the
government,” Mattingly said, adding that various government initiatives
are designed to promote pro bono work.
The
small community of immigration lawyers in the New Orleans area wants to
help. Along with national advocates, they are scrambling to enlist new
recruits. Kathleen Gasparian,
an immigration lawyer in Metairie, La., started a program called
PB&J: Pro Bono and Juveniles, which recruits pro bono attorneys and
matches them with immigrant kids who have recently crossed the southern
border and cannot afford legal services. Rizzo recently
organized a conference to tackle Louisiana’s crisis in immigration
representation, and convenes a monthly working group of local
stakeholders. “The immigration court system is broken,” Gasparian says.
The
issues were multiplying even before children started arriving.
Louisiana has just two immigration courts, and the second, in the small
city of Oakdale, more than three
hours northwest of New Orleans, handles only detention cases. The
backlog of pending cases statewide has soared to 6,703, up from just 732
a decade ago. “Now, you don’t even get your first hearing for a year,”
says Ken Mayeaux, a professor at Louisiana State
University Law Center in Baton Rouge who runs an immigration clinic for
students. The average wait time for pending cases in the EOIR has
climbed to 587 days.
Compounding
that lengthening backlog, the New Orleans court is without a single
devoted judge. Instead, a rotating trio of judges handle the docket,
usually commuting
from the Oakdale facility. Sometimes cases are decided over video
conference.
The
lack of a permanent judge is a symptom of a national problem, created
by a hiring freeze imposed in 2011 by Attorney General Eric Holder as
DOJ sought to cut costs
in the teeth of the recession. The hiring freeze was lifted in
February, but Mattingly declined to say when a new full-time judge will
start at New Orleans immigration court.
On
a steamy Thursday morning this month, TIME visited the court, on Canal
Street downtown, in an attempt to observe proceedings. There were about
six cases on the docket
for the day, according to a printed list in the entryway, but two
security guards barred this correspondent from entering, citing
instructions from the presiding judge.
“In
certain cases, including hearings involving credible fear reviews, the
hearing is closed to the public unless the alien states for the record
that he or she waves
that requirement,” Mattingly later wrote in an email. On that day, she
added, “there were no open cases.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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