🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽‍⚖️VERA INSTITUTE RECOMMENDS FEDERAL DEFENDER PROGRAM FOR IMMIGRANTS — Widespread Public Support For Representation In Immigration Court!

https://www.vera.org/publications/a-federal-defender-service-for-immigrants

Overview

The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) recommends that the Biden administration draw from time-tested models, data, and knowledge to build a federally funded, universal legal defense service that provides universal, zealous, and person-centered defense to all immigrants. This federal defender service should be modeled on the criminal federal defender system, which is generally regarded as more successful at realizing the values of high-quality, appropriately funded representation than its state counterparts. Vera makes this recommendation based on years of experience building and managing national immigrant legal defense programs. A federal defender service built on these core values is effective and achievable, and it would help ensure that the lives, liberty, and community health of immigrants are given full and equal protection under the law regardless of status. This policy brief highlights that a federal defender service would address systemic inequities of the immigration system and has widespread support in the United States.

Authors

Vera Institute of Justice

Action Areas

• 
  Supporting Immigrants
  

Key Takeaway

A federally funded, universal legal defense service that provides universal, zealous, and person-centered defense to all immigrants would help address systemic inequities within the immigration system, and would represent a safeguard that is already proven, effective, achievable, and has widespread public support.

Publication Highlights

• Vera has already worked with government partners, legal defense providers, advocates, and impacted people to create, test, and refine national immigrant legal defense programs grounded in universality, zealousness, and person-centeredness.
• A federal defender service would combat the burden of racist immigration policies that most severely impact immigrants with criminal convictions, poor immigrants, Black immigrants, and immigrants with severe mental health conditions.
• Without a federal defender service, tens of thousands of immigrants, including long-term permanent residents, asylum seekers, and parents of U.S.-citizen children, must face a hostile immigration system without representation.

Key Facts

Previous

Immigrants with attorneys are also

10 times more likely

to establish their right to remain in the United States than those without legal representation.

77%

of the 195,625 people whose immigration court cases completed in Fiscal Year 2019 did not have legal representation.

Immigrants with attorneys are

3.5 times more likely

to be granted bond than those without representation.

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You can download the full report at the above link.

The Biden Administration should work into this effort the already operating, highly acclaimed, innovative VIISTA program pioneered and developed by Professor Michele Pistone at Villanova Law for training of non-attorney representatives to provide high-quality representation to asylum seekers in Immigration Court. 

https://immigrationcourtside.com/category/professor-michele-pistone/vista-program/

Lots of the groundwork for a universal representation program has already been done! It’s about putting the right folks from outside Government in charge and building on the established foundation to take it to another level.

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-28-21