Legal Representation for Asylum

Difficulties for Women and Children in Finding Legal Representation for Asylum Cases

 

The Chicago Reporter posted a story yesterday on the obstacle that asylum seekers in Chicago face in findings lawyers. There are immigration courts in cities across the United States, including Chicago. The Chicago Immigration Court has seen nearly 1,500 cases of women with children in the past year and only 14% are represented by lawyers. According to TRAC at Syracuse University, that is less than half of the national average. TRAC’s data also reports that women and children who have an attorney representing them in their asylum cases are sixteen times more likely to be allowed to remain in the United States.

 

There are many issues that contribute to this current state. Whereas the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees that a defendant standing trial in criminal court is entitled to competent representation, the same protections do not exist in Immigration Court. The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not carry the same robust guarantees. Chicago’s Immigration Court alone has 450,000 cases pending. We blogged this week that Immigration Court is facing its worst backlog in history. One judge in Chicago is assigned to each case involving unaccompanied children and women with children. An immigration judge in San Francisco believes that attorneys are important to resolving the crisis because representation “helps judges make the decisions they need with the information they need, and to work through those cases both more quickly and more fairly.”

 

Asylum can be a difficult legal standard for a seeker to meet, especially for individuals from certain countries with certain claims (gang-related claims from Central America require an exceptional angle). They can be notoriously difficult to prove with evidence and credibility needs to be established. It is also a discretionary form of relief, meaning that meeting the standard for it is not enough to merit a favorable decision.