The Trump administration has ordered an immediate stop to federally funded legal aid for detained immigrants, abruptly halting an Arizona program that gave basic legal and “know-your-rights” presentations to around 2,000 detainees annually.
“We’re not talking about lawyers representing people (in court). We’re talking about the most basic information about what is even happening to you,” Laura St. John, legal director for Arizona’s Florence Immigration and Refugee Rights Project, said Wednesday. “If this stop-work order is not reversed, hundreds of thousands of immigrants (nationwide) will be forced to represent themselves in legal proceedings with no information or understanding of the legal process they are going through.”
A Jan. 22 memo from the U.S. Department of Justice, obtained by ABC News, told attorneys participating in four federally funded legal-aid programs to “stop work immediately.”
A lawyer with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project assists an asylum seeker from Honduras with his application in this 2020 file photo.
Those include the Legal Orientation Program, which was modeled off the Florence Project’s provision of legal services and which has been funded by Congress since 2003. It historically had bipartisan support due to its cost-effectiveness, St. John said.
Trump administration officials have expressed frustration over advocates’ efforts to help immigrants, with or without legal status, understand their rights in the U.S.
On Tuesday Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan lamented that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has had trouble detaining people in Chicago who were “very well-educated” on their rights, thanks to a city educational campaign.
“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals,” Homan told CNN on Tuesday. “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’”
St. John said the Florence Project asked federal officials if they could still provide the services to detainees without using any government funds. That request was denied Tuesday, she said.
“That is incredibly disturbing, because it shows what we think is real potential intent to deny people their rights, and to do it in a way that’s ensuring folks don’t know what’s happening and so they just give up,” she said.
The Florence Project is considering legal action over the move to restrict detainees’ access to information, she said.
“We are seriously considering whether litigation needs to happen,” she said. “We’d like to be paid for our work, but we feel that what’s happening with folks being detained and denied these services is so important that we’re willing to do it without being paid, if that’s what it comes down to.”
Advocates worry the heightened ICE enforcement could sweep up and rapidly deport people who do have a legal path to stay in the U.S., or even U.S. citizens.
St. John said she’s encountered U.S. citizens in ICE detention, and she met them through the Legal Orientation Program that has just been halted. The other programs affected by the stop-work order are the Family Group Legal Orientation Program, the Immigration Court Helpdesk and the Counsel for Children Initiative.
In Arizona on any given day, there are 2,000 to 3,000 people detained in ICE facilities, St. John said. Unlike defendants in the criminal justice system, immigrants facing deportation don’t have a right to an attorney, although they can hire one.
ICE agents are now facing daily arrest quotas, as the Trump administration pushes to increase arrests across the nation, which advocates say will inevitably result in more indiscriminate detentions.
“This administration has made very clear that it wants to mass deport as many people as possible. Well, mass deportation starts with mass detention,” Michael Lukens, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said in a Monday press briefing. “And if you have detention numbers going up and nobody to help, you’re essentially setting up black sites around the country where there is no rule of law, where there is no transparency or accountability, and this is just unacceptable.”
Of the nearly 1,200 arrests ICE made nationwide on Jan. 26, 52% had criminal records and the rest were only detained because they lacked legal status, NBC News reported Monday, citing federal data.
The Trump administration has also expanded the use of “expedited removal” — which allows deportations without an immigration hearing — to include people living in the interior of the U.S. who can’t prove they’ve lived here for at least two years.
“This is like asking people to not only ‘show me your papers’ or proof of status, but to always carry a dossier around with them to show how long they’ve lived in the U.S., which is not realistic,” St. John said.
As ICE scales up arrests in the U.S. interior, the Trump administration is planning an expansion of the agency’s detention capacity.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced plans to open a 30,000-bed migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. military base in Cuba, the Associated Press reported.
The announcement came just before Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, which garnered the support of Arizona’s Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly. Opponents say the legislation will dramatically increase the number of people ICE is required to detain, including those accused, but not convicted, of shoplifting or theft-related offenses.
Advocates in Tucson say they’re also holding regular “Know Your Rights” sessions as immigrants — both those with and without legal status — have experienced growing alarm since Trump took office, after a campaign promising mass deportations.
Even immigrants who until recently had legal status are now vulnerable, advocates say, as Trump’s executive orders have suddenly canceled existing legal pathways for humanitarian parole, created under the Biden administration to channel migrants to ports of entry and discourage unauthorized entries between official ports.
St. John said that not only does basic legal counseling help immigrants defend themselves and ensure they get a court hearing in a language they understand; it also helps those without a path to stay in the U.S. to make a well-informed decision not to fight their case, she said.
“There’s two sides to this coin,” she said. “Most people we encounter, if they don’t have a way to stay, they don’t want to stay in detention and fight a case they can’t win. There’s major efficiency to this model, as well.”
A 2012 Department of Justice cost-savings analysis found that people who received those legal services saw their immigration cases finish on average 12 days sooner than those who did not, and spent six fewer days in ICE detention, saving the federal government $17.8 million in fiscal year 2011.
