Government funds lawyers for immigrant children
Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, said on Tuesday that it is the first time the office that oversees programs for unaccompanied immigrant children will provide money for direct legal representation.
The grants to two organizations are part of a bigger $9 million project that aims to provide lawyers to 2,600 children. The move comes after the number of unaccompanied Central American children arriving on the U.S.-Mexico border more than doubled this past year.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, said the funding violates federal law “and only makes the problem worse by encouraging more illegal immigration in the future.”
Most of the nearly 60,000 unaccompanied children who have arrived on the border don’t have attorneys, and immigrant advocates have been scrambling to secure grant funding and ramp up efforts to recruit and train pro bono lawyers to represent them in deportation hearings.
Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the grants provided to it and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants “is a recognition that many of these children have valid protection claims and they need legal help to navigate the process.”
Under the program, immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who are lawfully in the United States will be able to request that child relatives still in those three countries be resettled in the United States as refugees. The program would establish in-country processing to screen the young people to determine if they qualify to join relatives in the U.S.
The program would not provide a path for minors to join relatives illegally in the United States, and would not apply to those who have entered the country illegally.
Instead, it aims to set up an orderly alternative for dealing with young people who otherwise might embark on a dangerous journey to join their families in the United States.
The United Nations has pushed the U.S. to treat children arriving at the southern border from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as refugees displaced by armed conflict.
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