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Over 130 Organizations, Including Legal Services Providers, Urge DOJ and DHS to Reject Expedited “Dedicated Dockets” for Asylum Seekers

For Immediate Release
June 22, 2021

 


Over 130 organizations sent a letter this week to the White House and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security opposing a proposed process for expedited “dedicated dockets” for asylum-seeking families that was announced by the agencies on May 28. The letter was signed by 62 organizations providing immigration legal services to individuals facing removal proceedings in the ten cities that were listed in the May 28 announcement (Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle).

In the letter, the organizations urge the agencies to abandon the proposed “dedicated docket process” before its implementation begins, or at a minimum delay implementation until the agencies can take steps to ensure that the families undergoing the process have guaranteed access to legal representation and to a restored and enhanced asylum system. The organizations pointed out that legal providers in the ten cities listed in the May 28 announcement are already under-funded and must reject a large number of requests for pro bono legal representation from non-citizens facing removal proceedings. In fact, there were over 140,000 deportation cases pending in the immigration courts in those ten cities in which the individual was not represented by an attorney as of the end of May 2021. People facing deportation hearings do not currently have the right to appointed counsel if they cannot afford an attorney, even though the federal government is represented by an experienced attorney in every case.

Full text of the letter is available here.