The Trump administration has gutted a Justice Department program that helped many thousands of illegal migrants fight the department’s own deportation cases.
“It’s going to cause serious problems within the immigration system,” Danielle DeWinter, the legal director of the pro-migration Immigration Project in Illinois, said.
Her group has used the Justice Department’s program to get advice and accreditation when fighting 948 cases where the federal government was trying to deport migrants.
In this latest salvo to combat illegal migration, the DOJ has effectively shut down the Recognition and Accreditation program, created in 1983, which is part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which was founded in the 1950s and was designed to hand federal funding to a large number of nonprofit organizations — including Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services — to provide qualified legal representation for low-income immigrants. The program gave training and certification to immigrants rights activists so that they had legal standing to represent migrants in immigration courts.
But this month, the senior DOJ attorneys who oversaw the program were reassigned and the program was effectively neutered. This hobbled the program because the reassignments left no one in the office qualified to “approve or renew” the certifications, according to CBS News.
The DOJ says that the program has not been eliminated because it is “established by regulation”; however, the office has basically ceased being able to fulfill its charge since its attorneys were reassigned.
This office has had far-reaching consequences for decades aiding tens of thousands of illegal migrants to attain legal status each year. The program uses tax dollars to help illegal migrants game the system to attain legal status despite having broken our laws to get here in the first place.
By 2023 the office had greatly increased the number of accredited representatives dealing with illegals. Among other services, the representatives accredited by the office helped illegal migrants appeal their immigration denials and ward off deportations.
The program was huge and involved more than 850 nonprofit migrants’ rights organizations.
“Although most DOJ-recognized organizations are immigration legal services organizations, many recognized organizations do not self-identify principally as immigration legal services providers,” according to a 2023 publication by Villanova University.
The Villanova report, titled “The Crisis of Unrepresented Immigrants: Vastly Increasing the Number of Accredited Representatives Offers the Best Hope for Resolving It,” says:
The roster of approximately 850 recognized organizations includes public libraries, job training and workforce development programs, domestic violence shelters and treatment programs, English language programs, labor unions, parish- and faith unit–based charitable organizations and ethnic ministries, family resource centers, DREAMer programs, and other student groups.
These accredited non-attorney representatives, for instance, helped 7,779 migrants with their removal cases between 2010 and 2020, Villanova added.
Activists in Illinois note that they have served approximately 948 individuals in Central and Southern Illinois, according to WGLT.org.
DeWinter, the legal director of the Immigration Project in Illinois — which is funded in part by “Yield Giving, a philanthropic initiative founded by Mackenzie Scott,” the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos — says she is worried that her organization’s applications for new accreditation may not be approved with the DOJ’s move to gut the program.
“It’s already an extremely complicated process, and it’s going to have more individuals who are now working through that process without the proper knowledge of it—of the system itself,” DeWinter said.
“R&A programs and other programs that fund legal services and legal providers, their whole job is helping people get those papers, helping them to be secure, helping them to find stability in the United States based off of relief that they are legally eligible to apply for,” she added.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.