As the backlog of cases in immigration courts grows, the Department of Justice announced it has awarded $1.8 million in grants to legal aid organizations to help move cases through the system.
A prominent proponent of stronger border security, however, denounced the move as an effort to force taxpayers to “underwrite a costly and dysfunctional system.”
The Justice Department funds were awarded through another federal agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service. The stated aim is to “increase the effective and efficient adjudication of immigration proceedings” by enabling legal aid groups to hire 100 lawyers and paralegals to represent unaccompanied minors who unlawfully crossed into the country.
But the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which strives to limit illegal immigration, sees the Justice Department move as an unnecessary use of taxpayer dollars to prop up an already “unmanageable” system.
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Those going through immigration courts are not entitled to an attorney, the group notes.
“This is unprecedented because immigration proceedings are civil in nature,” FAIR President Dan Stein said, adding:
Immigration proceedings have never required an attorney and certainly never been a taxpayer expense. There are organizations aligned with the [Obama] administration that want to turn immigration proceedings into the equivalent of a criminal trial. They analogize deportation to be certain death, to justify taxpayers’ continually underwriting a costly and dysfunctional system.
The Justice Department assistance, announced Friday, comes after the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University released a report saying 396,552 cases were pending in the federal agency’s 59 immigration courts as of the end of July.
As of the end of July, 396,552 cases were pending in the 59 federal immigration courts.
The backlog grew by more than 75,000 cases since the start of the budget year last October, the report showed.
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The federal Department of Homeland Security has reported that since Oct. 1 more than 66,000 unaccompanied child immigrants, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been caught crossing the Mexican border illegally.
The Justice Department announced earlier this year plans to move cases of unaccompanied minors to the top of the court docket.
Of the $1.8 million in grants, Attorney General Eric Holder said:
By increasing the number of represented children, we will enhance the resources available to both the children and the courts to better serve the administration of justice in all cases.
