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borders alone are children . Children who are caught up in the complexity and are unprotected are incredibly vulnerable . The confusion created by this web leaves non-citizen children without protection .
Sadly, in immigration law, the federal system has failed to provide free counsel to anyone, let alone children, who are often invisible and voiceless as a bureaucratic system operates around them .6 Data gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests indicates that between fiscal year 2005 and December of 2015, the government has initiated 169,684 juvenile cases in the Immigration Court, known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) .7 The number of juveniles in the immigration removal system has steadily increased . In fiscal year 2005, approximately 8,910 juvenile cases began in Immigration Court .8 Ten years later, in fiscal year 2015, 28,819 juvenile cases were filed in Immigration Court . In 2014, the number of juvenile cases filed in Immigration Court was 56,167 . And perhaps of greater importance is that juvenile cases have been a growing percentage of the overall EOIR workload . In fiscal year 2014, the cases initiated for juveniles represented 24% of the total of new cases filed .9
Only as the crisis widened and expanded did the Administration of President Barack Obama find limited funds through the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) to assist with the dearth of legal counsel . In 2014, the CNCS created the Justice AmeriCorps program that funded less than 100 one-year attorney fellowship positions .10 The Justice AmeriCorps fellows can only represent unaccompanied children who are under the age of 16 at the time of entry to the United States . Fellows are expected to handle twenty-five to forty cases during their one-year fellowships; a challenging goal as many cases require more than one year to complete and most fellows are new attorneys with limited experience . The funding provides stipends of $19,800 annually (a sum that is less than half of the public interest fellow salary in most major cities) . Whether this program will be renewed or expanded beyond 2015 is unknown . Further,
6 In recent litigation in Southern California, the u.S. Department of homeland Security (DhS) agreed to provide appointed counsel in cases where the respondent non-citizen was mentally incompetent. The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) which is part of the Department of Justice is in the process of developing more procedures to try to recruit and locate free counsel for the mentally incompetent. Franco-Gonzales v. holder, 767 F. Supp. 2d 1034 (C.D. Cal. 2010). See also Judge Robert A. Katzmann, u.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, The Orison S. Marden Lecture of the Ass’n of the Bar of the City of NewYork:The Legal Profession and the unmet Needs of the Immigrant Poor (Feb. 28, 2007), available at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v7_ KcCfj_oAJ:www.aila.org/File/DownloadEmbeddedFile/40681+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari. The EOIR does provide some funds for “know your rights presentations” provided by nonprofit legal services organizations. Organizations receiving these funds may not provide direct legal representation under the terms of the grants. am. bar. ass’n, The fund for JusTice and educaTion 2009-2010 annual rePorT, available at http://www. americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/images/fund_justice_education/fje_ar0910.pdf.
7 See Juveniles—Immigration Court Deportation Proceedings, Trac immigraTion, http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/ immigration/juvenile/ (last visited on Feb. 21, 2016) (data shared in a tool reported on juvenile cases before EOIR). The official statistical yearbook of the EOIR does not separate out cases classified as unaccompanied children or juveniles. Statistical Year Book, u.S. deP’T of JusT., http://www.justice.gov/eoir/statistical-year-book (last visited Feb. 21, 2016).
8 See Juveniles, supra note 7 (data shared in a tool reported on juvenile cases before EOIR).
9 The EOIR reported 225,896 new cases initiated in fiscal year 2014 and the TRAC data reported 56,097 new juvenile
cases for that time period. The 2015 fiscal year data was not yet available at the time of this writing.
10 See Justice AmeriCorps Legal Services for Unaccompanied Children, corP. for naT’l and communiTy serV., http:// www.nationalservice.gov/build-your-capacity/grants/funding-opportunities/2014/justice-americorps-legal-services (last visited Feb. 21, 2016). Safe Passage Project received a grant under this program and actively participates in the Justice AmeriCorps program. It is hoped that this program will help establish that providing free counsel to indigent children is cost effective and helps reduce the length of the immigration case, thereby reducing government costs in the administration of the cases as well.
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice