A temporary end to the funding for two programs intended to help undocumented immigrants in detention centers and immigration courts has been announced by the Department of Justice, and the move was confirmed by officials from the Vera Institute of Justice on Tuesday. The non-profit immigrant advocacy organization implemented the two programs that were funded by the Department of Justice, the Immigration Court Helpdesk and the Legal Orientation Program (LOP).
Vera works alongside legal service providers across the United States to offer undocumented immigrants and their relatives access to LOP and help desk programs. National Immigrant Justice Center Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy stated that the LOP offers a lifeline for more than 40,000 immigrants who face complicated deportation proceedings from detention centers in remote areas every day.
The National Immigrant Justice Center administers the programs alongside Vera. According to the statement, the two programs assist 53,000 immigrants every year, primarily in immigration courts. A backlog of such cases in immigration courts has been a problem for the United States in recent years, with a June 2017 report from the US Government Accountability Office revealing that the backlog had increased twofold between 2006 and 2015.
In the first two months of the 2018 fiscal year, cases rose by 30,000 to reach nearly 660,000, according to a Syracuse University count of case records. On April 2, the Department of Justice announced that it would begin to evaluate immigration court judges on the number of cases they close and the speed in which they close them, a quota system McCarthy calls “unreasonable”.