NYC sets up system of public defenders for poor immigrants

New York City has created what advocates say is the nation's first system of public defenders for poor immigrants facing deportation.

The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project will cover all eligible immigrant city residents detained in the system and appearing in immigration courts in New York City or the New Jersey cities of Elizabeth and Newark.

The City Council approved $4.9 million for the initiative as part of the $75 billion budget passed last week for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Immigration law is incredibly complex, and it is exceedingly difficult for immigrants to succeed in making a case for themselves -- even if they have legal grounds for one -- if they don't have an attorney, said Oren Root, of the Vera Institute of Justice, which is coordinating and overseeing the project.

He said data showed immigrants without attorneys won their cases about 3 percent of the time, while those with attorneys were much more likely to be successful.

The point is fairness, Root said, and "you can't have fair proceedings without persons being represented."

Root said organizations in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco were also looking into similar initiatives.

Ultimately, he said, the hope was that the federal government would start paying for counsel.

The initiative started last year as a pilot. The pilot program had enough funds to take on 190 clients, some whose cases are still pending. Root said that by the end of May, 10 cases had been concluded in which the immigrant was determined to have the right to stay in the United States.

Other cases have ended with immigrants being deported because they didn't have the legal grounds to stay, but even they benefited from the presence of an attorney, said Andrea Saenz of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Benjamin Cardozo School of Law.