Access to Counsel in Immigration Court by Ingrid Eagly and Steven Shafer
The American Immigration Council released, Access to Counsel in Immigration Court by Ingrid Eagly and Steven Shafer, Esq. The authors conducted the first national study of access to counsel in immigration courts and analyzed 1.2 million individual removal cases in immigration court between fiscal years 2007 and 2012. They found that access to legal counsel was uneven across geographic locations and nationalities. They also found that having a lawyer results in better outcomes for immigrants and that represented immigrants were more likely to be released from detention, more likely to apply for relief, and to obtain the relief they sought.
These important findings highlight some of the disparities in the immigration court system. Whether or not immigrants obtain a lawyer varies widely depending on whether they are detained, where their court proceeding takes place, and what nationality they are. These inequalities and barriers to obtaining legal counsel need to be addressed because having an attorney is also strongly associated with positive outcomes. Overall, the study found that only two percent of those who applied for relief from deportation succeeded without an attorney.
The main findings of this study include:
Access to counsel is scarce and unevenly distributed across the United States
- Nationally, only 37 percent of all immigrants secured legal representation in their removal cases.
- Immigrants in detention were the least likely to obtain representation. Only 14 percent of detained immigrants acquired legal counsel, compared with two-thirds of nondetained immigrants.
- New York City’s representation rate for nondetained cases (87 percent) was a full 40 percent higher than that of Atlanta (47 percent).
- Immigrants with court hearings in small cities were more than four times less likely to obtain counsel than those with hearings in large cities (11 percent in small cities versus 47 percent in large cities).
- Mexican immigrants had the highest detention rate (78 percent) and the lowest representation rate (21 percent) of nationalities examined. In contrast, Chinese immigrants had the lowest detention rate (4 percent) and highest representation rate (92 percent).
Immigrants with attorneys fare better at every stage of the court process
- Represented immigrants in detention who had a custody hearing were four times more likely to be released from detention (44 percent with counsel versus 11 percent without).
- Represented immigrants were much more likely to apply for relief from deportation.
- Detained immigrants with counsel were nearly 11 times more likely to seek relief such as asylum than those without representation (32 percent with counsel versus 3 percent without).
- Immigrants who were never detained were five times more likely to seek relief if they had an attorney (78 percent with counsel versus 15 percent without).
- Represented immigrants were more likely to obtain the immigration relief they sought.
- Among detained immigrants, those with representation were twice as likely as unrepresented immigrants to obtain immigration relief if they sought it (49 percent with counsel versus 23 percent without).
- Represented immigrants who were never detained were nearly five times more likely than their unrepresented counterparts to obtain relief if they sought it (63 percent with counsel versus 13 percent without).
KJ