New York program provides public defenders in deportation cases
Lorelei Laird in the ABA Journal reports on the success of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project.
Judge Robert Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit saw the problems caused by the lack of guaranteed representation in removal cases. There is no right to appointed counsel in immigration cases because deportation have been deemed to be a civil, not criminal, proceeding.
“I was able to see, in case after case, the carnage that results when families and individuals don’t have adequate counsel,” Katzmann said as part of a panel, “No Deportation Without Representation,” at the American Bar Association’s 2014 annual meeting in Boston. “I always had a sense that … if there had been a good lawyer, then the outcome might have been different, the family might not have been torn asunder.”
Katzmann convened a group that helped form the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project. It offers representation to detained immigrants, accepting everyone who meets income criteria. Publicly funded by New York City, the project essentially created a public defender system for the immigration courts.
The Vera Institute of Justice says attorneys have reunited more than half of their clients with their families. The project has expanded to two upstate New York immigration courts, and is being used as a model for programs planned in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
KJ