The Trump administration has pulled the plug on a program that provides legal help to immigrants who are determined mentally incompetent, according to a lawsuit filed by immigration legal groups.
The groups, which filed the lawsuit in District of Columbia federal district court late Monday, said about 200 people were getting services through the terminated program known as the National Qualified Representative Program.
Attorneys said the end of the representation leaves some of the most vulnerable immigrants — those with mental health issues, cognitive disabilities, traumatic brain injuries — in danger. The program ended in every state except for Arizona, California and Washington, where it was originally established as part of a legal settlement.
“People who suffer from mental illness in a lot of countries around the world are at grave risk of torture and death,” and without counsel, deportation could subject them to those conditions, David Faherty, supervising attorney for adult detention with the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told NBC News.
NBC News has reached out to the White House and Justice Department for comment. The Department of Homeland Security deferred to the Justice Department on comment.
The program is the latest target of the Trump administration as it seeks to accelerate deportations and dismantle legal programs that support immigrants. The administration also has been trying to choke off money that pays for immigration attorneys who assist unaccompanied immigrant children. It ended orientation programs for detainees that informed them of their rights, and it plans to replace lawyers representing children and parents or guardians separated at the border under the previous Trump administration with the administration’s own lawyers.
In a March memo, President Donald Trump took issue with immigration lawyers, and directed the attorney general to take action against them in certain circumstances.
The April 25 termination of a contract with Acacia Center for Justice, the contractor that subcontracts with several of the legal groups that sued, had immediate impact, Faherty said.
Faherty had informed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and an immigration court that a man held in ICE custody had mental illness, which he learned from a call by a family member to the National Immigrant Justice Center’s hotline. An immigrant judge determined that the immigrant was not competent and needed a lawyer. That same day, the Trump administration pulled the plug on the program that would have provided one.
Faherty said usually once an attorney is mandated, the National Immigrant Justice Center would hear from the court to provide legal counsel. But it has not been contacted.
Along with assistance going through the process, the legal groups help set up forensic, medical and psychological evaluations; ensure there is access to treatment; or sometimes help immigrants get in touch with a lost family member, attorneys said.
The immigrants’ circumstances run the gamut, with some who are homeless, others whose mental illness has only begun to emerge, some who suffered traumatic brain injuries, and elder immigrants experiencing dementia. There are also those who have been diagnosed with mental illness and were undergoing treatment before ending up in ICE custody.
The program is popular with immigration judges because it makes their job easier, since they can leave the work of getting evaluations to attorneys, Faherty said.
“Having counsel in this situation, it’s more efficient. It moves much more smoothly through the immigration process than if you don’t have counsel,” he said.
The program the administration ended stems from a 2013 lawsuit in which the main plaintiff, José Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant with a cognitive disability, was detained for almost five years without a hearing or a lawyer.
The settlement of the 2010 suit applied only to immigrants in the states of Arizona, California and Washington. But the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration adopted a policy to extend the “enhanced” protections for immigrants to those in all other states.
“The government’s action in cutting funding for court-appointed counsel for people not competent to represent themselves in immigration court is not just heartless and cruel, but also discriminatory against people with disabilities,” Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, another plaintiff, stated in a news release.
Veronica Barba, a California attorney who handles cases covered by the terminated program, said the difference since the settlement is like night and day.
“People were languishing in the courts and detention centers for years and years,” Barba said. “The way I look at it, it could be any one of us who falls ill one day.”
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include American Gateways, Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, Estrella del Paso, Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, National Immigrant Justice Center, Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, and Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
