President Biden in his immigration plan released this week, proposed that Congress should make available $15 million to cover the costs of private lawyers for “families and vulnerable individuals,” with another $23 million to cover legal orientation programs administered by the Justice Department. The proposal, first outlined in Biden's fiscal year 2022 budget, is the first time that an administration has proposed covering such an expense, and the White House has not shared additional information.
The $15 million in funding would only be enough to cover several thousand people, as per a study from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
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Last year, Heritage senior fellow for homeland security Lora Ries examined deportation defense costs to provide a frame of reference for asylum cases and found each person spent between $2,000 and $10,000. At the lower end of $2,000 per person, 7,500 migrants would be able to have lawyers. On the higher end of $10,000 per person, just 1,500 people would be covered.
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Over the past four months alone, 190,000 people illegally came across the southern border with a family member, and another 64,000 unaccompanied children arrived in America. The cost to the federal government of providing lawyers for those 250,000 family members and adults, at the $2,000 rate, would come to a total of approximately $500 million.
“They talk about providing legal representation to families and vulnerable individuals,” said Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge from the York Immigration Court in Pennsylvania. “We don’t really know what that consists of, but it could be just families. It could be just women with children. I don’t know. The language is so vague — it’s problematic.”
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Ries and Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a group that advocates for tighter restrictions on immigration, pointed to a passage in the Immigration Nationality Act that they said bars the government from spending its own money on legal representation in immigration proceedings.
Section 292 of the law states that “in any removal proceedings before an immigration judge and in any appeal proceedings before the Attorney General from any such removal proceedings, the person concerned shall have the privilege of being represented (at no expense to the Government) by such counsel, authorized to practice in such proceedings, as he shall choose.”
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“An alien should pay for their own counsel, or there are many, many pro bono organizations and advocacy organizations that can represent them. The American taxpayer should not be paying for an attorney for someone who is removable,” said Ries.
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Ries and Arthur argued it would not be fair to provide lawyers for people in immigration cases, which are civil matters, because U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents do not receive taxpayer-funded legal representation if they are the defendant in other civil matters, such as divorces or rent disputes.
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