Children without lawyers face deportation
TUCSON, Ariz. — After a long, scary trek through three countries to escape the gang violence in El Salvador, a 15-year-old boy found himself scared again a few months ago, this time in a federal immigration court.
There was an immigration judge in front of him and a federal prosecutor to his right, but there was no one helping him understand the charges against him.
“I was afraid I was going to make a mistake,” the boy said in Spanish from his uncle’s living room, in a modest cinder-block house on the south side of Tucson, Arizona. “When the judge asked me questions, I just shook my head yes and no. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.” ‘Out-of-step system’
Every week in immigration courts around the country, thousands of children act as their own lawyers, pleading for asylum or other type of relief in a legal system they do not understand.
Suspected killers, kid- nappers and others facing federal felony charges, no matter their ages, are entitled to court-appointed lawyers if they cannot afford them.
But children accused of violating immigration laws, a civil offense, do not have the same right.
In immigration court, people face charges from the government, but the government has no obligation to provide lawyers for poor children and adults, as it does in criminal cases, legal experts say.
Having a lawyer makes a difference. Between October 2004 and June of this year, more than half the children who did not have lawyers were deported.
Only one in 10 children who had legal representation were sent back, according to federal data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group connected to Syracuse University.
“We have looked for any legal system in the United States where children are required to represent themselves against a government lawyer — child welfare proceedings, juvenile delinquency proceed- ings. Wehave not yet found one, and the government hasn’t found one either,” Stephen Kang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Right Project, said in an interview.
“What we have in immigration court is an out-of-step system,” Kang said. “Children face federal prosecutors at adversarial court hearings that can have life-or-death consequences for the children involved.” ‘Moral obligation’
A class action filed by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations is trying to change that.
In a brief filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the federal government is contesting the court’s authority to hear the case, Justice Department lawyers insisted that “aliens in civil administrative removal proceedings have the privilege of being represented by retained counsel, but do not possess either a constitutional or statutory right to appointed counsel at taxpayer expense.”
Yet the government has also spent millions of dollars paying for lawyers to represent unaccompanied children in immigration courts — from modest programs in Baltimore and Tennessee to a $55 million effort by the Department of Health and Human Services in cities throughout the United States.
In remarks to the Hispanic National Bar Association in 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder said, “Though these children may not have a constitutional right to a lawyer, we have policy reasons and a moral obligation to ensure the presence of counsel.”