Eighteen-year-old Sam attended his immigration court hearing on Wednesday, April 9, in downtown Los Angeles without a lawyer.
He wore a black puffer jacket, jeans, and white sneakers, and held a bright blue folder with his documents, staring straight ahead as he waited for an immigration judge to call on him.
Sam, who asked that his last name not be published out of fear it could hurt his case, said it’s been difficult to find an attorney who will help him and represent him in his immigration proceedings. Walking into court on Wednesday, he felt nervous, he said, because “I didn’t know if I was going to be expelled from the country.”
Sam said he entered the U.S. when he was 16 years old with only a few personal belongings. He’s from Mexico and said he left because he didn’t want to be recruited to sell drugs.
“My friends who stayed in Mexico were buried a month ago,” the teenager said.
The struggle to stay afloat
As young adults, teens and youngsters in immigration court scramble to find legal representation, the organizations that until recently had the funding to provide it are struggling to stay afloat.
Last month, the Trump administration slashed funding tied to legal representation for 26,000 unaccompanied children across the country.
Now, some organizations providing low-cost or free immigration court representation services can’t take on any new clients and are forced to turn away children who are left to navigate their immigration court proceedings alone.
“That means that many children who have fled persecution, who have fled abuse, who qualify for legal status in the United States will be needlessly deported because it is nearly impossible for a non-attorney to understand what the law requires as far as filing applications and proving eligibility for legal status in the United States, and much less a child,” said Mickey Donovan-Kaloust, the director of legal services at Immigration Defenders in Los Angeles.
Immigration Defenders lost 50% of its funding last month, forcing it to lay off staff. The organization can’t take on any new cases, aside from a small group of unaccompanied minors who are detained.
The legal organization is only able to take on that small subset of cases because of a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in California last week that is supposed to temporarily restore legal aid services. Donovan-Kaloust said Immigration Defenders has not received confirmation that services have been restored.
‘A family separation crisis’
Because of the Trump administration’s move, Immigration Defenders has been forced to turn kids away who need help.
Donovan-Kaloust said that has been “really heartbreaking, because we have children in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody whose cases are being sped through the deportation process, who are nearing their 18th birthday and desperately need to file applications for relief and desperately need advice on their options, and we weren’t able to provide that.”
Children who enter the U.S. alone are placed into the resettlement office’s custody until they are moved to the custody of a vetted sponsor or until they turn 18 and transfer out of the system, sometimes into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The resettlement office has recently started sharing sponsor information with ICE “presumably for enforcement purposes. So that’s going to really place a chilling effect on sponsors, on families’ ability to receive their children, and it’s going to trap a lot of children in detention, indefinitely perhaps,” Donovan-Kaloust said.
“It’s going to create another family separation crisis like we saw under zero tolerance.”
Showing up alone
A few weeks ago in a downtown LA immigration courtroom, none of the juveniles who appeared in person for their hearings had an attorney. Some showed up with sponsors, one showed up alone. All cited difficulties finding legal representation for their immigration cases.
Alex, 18, was in the midst of removal proceedings. He entered the U.S. without permission when he was 16 years old. Speaking through a court-appointed Spanish interpreter, he said he feared going back to his native country of Guatemala. He did not elaborate.
Immigration Judge Rachel Ann Ruane noted that Alex requested more time to find an attorney during his last court date in January. Alex responded that he still could not find one.
For now, he is expected to represent himself in his removal proceedings.
According to the most recent data published by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 63.2% of people with pending immigration cases in LA County had legal representation.
But for those with immigration cases filed within the last 90 days of that published data, the number dropped to 23.6%.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the resettlement office, did not respond to a request for comment.