46th President of The United States
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FACT SHEET: President Biden to Sign Presidential Memorandum to Expand Access to Legal Representation and the Courts
MAY 18, 2021 • STATEMENTS AND RELEASES
Today, President Biden will sign a Presidential Memorandum to expand access to legal representation and the courts. As President Biden knows from his experience as a public defender, timely and affordable access to the legal system can make all the difference in a person’s life—including by keeping an individual out of poverty, keeping an individual in his or her home, helping an unaccompanied child seek asylum, helping someone fight a consumer scam, or ensuring that an individual charged with a crime can mount a strong defense and receive a fair trial. But low-income people have long struggled to secure quality access to the legal system. Those challenges have only increased during the public health and economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, civil legal aid providers and public defenders have been under-resourced, understaffed, and unable to reach some of the people in greatest need of their services.
The federal government has a critical role to play in expanding access to the nation’s legal system and supporting the work of civil legal aid providers and public defenders. President Biden’s executive action today will reinvigorate the federal government’s role in advancing access to justice, and help ensure that the Administration’s policies and recovery efforts can reach as many individuals as possible.
The Presidential Memorandum is the Biden-Harris Administration’s latest action to protect vulnerable Americans, reform the justice system, and advance racial equity. On his first day in office, the President issued an executive order establishing a government-wide initiative to put equity at the heart of each agency’s priorities and management agenda. His discretionary budget request called for $1.5 billion in funding for grants to strengthen state and local criminal justice systems, including by investing in public defenders. Improving access to counsel in civil and criminal proceedings builds on each of these efforts.
Specifically, President Biden is directing the following actions:
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Read the rest of the “White House Fact Sheet” at the above link.
On one hand, this is welcome news for the NDPA and all who favor equal justice under law in America.
On the other hand, four months into his Administration, President Biden has just gotten around to undoing some of the inane, White Nationalist actions of the Trump Administration by re-establishing initiatives that failed to solve the problems under the Obama Administration only to be completely eradicated by Trump. In plain terms, more study and dialogue, no real action that helps any of the more than one one million poor souls and their loved ones caught up in Garland’s dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
I submit that the huge problems with lack of effective representation in Immigration Court were well known at the outset of the Trump Administration. Over the last four years, lots of creative ideas have surfaced and a number of states, localities, and NGOs have substantially “upped” their commitment to pro bono or low bono services for asylum seekers, detainees, and other migrants. There is lots of “practical scholarly” literature out there on the subject.
Therefore, it would have been reasonable to expect the Biden Administration to take office with specific plans in hand to immediately start building on existing structures and to have immediately re-started the dialogue with legal service providers. Instead, more than 100 days in, we have plans for more study, talk, and recommendations, but no action; the actual situation in the Immigration Courts under Garland continues rapidly to deteriorate; progressive groups of experts with plans on how to solve representation issues have basically been “frozen out” by Biden — writing op-eds, “white papers,” and studies, rather than leading the representation effort from within the Biden Administration and working as part of a team to solve problems in “real time.”
I’ve heard that some plans for improving representation, at least for “vulnerable groups,” are “in the offing” at DOJ. To date, we’ve seen nothing!
And, I can’t name anyone on “Team Garland” or in current EOIR senior management who actually has first-hand experience with pro bono representation in Immigration Court or who has previously offered concrete, positive suggestions for immediate actions to solve this pressing problem. Consequently, I’m frankly skeptical that the expertise exists, particularly at DOJ, to solve this problem without some dramatic personnel shakeups, more aggressive due process restoring actions, and bringing in progressive experts from the outside to administer and improve judging at EOIR. So far, Garland has shown little interest in addressing the dysfunction in his “wholly owned courts,” nor has he shown any ability to reach out and actively recruit the progressive experts he needs to fix EOIR.
Given the disaster of the last four years and Garland’s poor start (including “in your face” judicial appointments and retention of non-progressive Barr holdovers) its going to take a positive outreach campaign to progressives by Garland to stop the bleeding at DOJ.
Therefore, I personally view the White House announcement with “very cautious optimism,” hoping to be pleasantly surprised when it spurs immediate practical action.
Stay tuned!
🇺🇸🗽Due Process Forever!
PWS
05-18-21