Time for community activists to step up to the plate.
The Department of Justice will not renew funding for a legal orientation program for detained immigrants — at least temporarily — beginning in May while it reevaluates the program’s effectiveness.
The program, which began in 2003 nationwide and came to San Diego in 2008, provides basic guidance on how the system works to people who are held in custody while they wait for their cases to progress in immigration court. About 53,000 people participated in its orientation sessions last year across the country, and more than 3,500 of them were in Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
The DOJ intended for the orientation program to improve efficiency in immigration courts by helping people make better-informed decisions and avoid unnecessary appeals.
Because immigration court is a civil court, not a criminal one, those going through the system don’t have a right to an attorney. Detainees often have trouble finding lawyers and most go unrepresented.
“Experience has shown that the LOP has had positive effects on the immigration court process,” the DOJ website says about the program. “Detained individuals make wiser, more informed decisions and are more likely to obtain representation; non-profit organizations reach a wider audience of people with minimal resources; and, cases are more likely to be completed faster, resulting in fewer court hearings and less time spent in detention.”
While the Trump administration has pushed immigration courts to decrease a backlog of more than 680,000 cases and added case-completion quotas to immigration judge performance reviews, the DOJ decided to pause the legal orientation program during its evaluation of the program’s cost-effectiveness.
An official for the Executive Office for Immigration Review said that immigration judges are required to inform people in proceedings about their rights, how the court works and how to contact free legal help.