Biden Looks to Have Federal Government Provide Lawyers for Migrants at Border

The Biden administration aims to spend millions of dollars to cover the cost of lawyers for migrants who have illegally entered the country, a prospect that has infuriated immigration restrictionists.

President Joe Biden proposed in his immigration plan released this week that Congress should make available $15 million to cover the costs of private lawyers for “families and vulnerable individuals,” with another $23 million to cover legal orientation programs administered by the Justice Department. The proposal, first outlined in Biden’s fiscal year 2022 budget, is the first time that an administration has proposed covering such an expense, and the White House has not shared additional information.

The $15 million in funding would only be enough to cover several thousand people, according to a study from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Immigration lawyers charge between $150 and $300 per hour.

Heritage senior fellow for homeland security Lora Ries last year examined deportation defense costs to provide a frame of reference for asylum cases and found each person spent between $2,000 and $10,000. {snip}

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“They talk about providing legal representation to families and vulnerable individuals,” said Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge from the York Immigration Court in Pennsylvania. “We don’t really know what that consists of, but it could be just families. It could be just women with children. I don’t know. The language is so vague — it’s problematic.”

Ries and Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a group that advocates for tighter restrictions on immigration, pointed to a passage in the Immigration Nationality Act that they said bars the government from spending its own money on legal representation in immigration proceedings.

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Ries and Arthur said it would not be fair to provide lawyers for people in immigration cases, which are civil matters, because U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents do not receive taxpayer-funded legal representation if they are the defendant in other civil matters, such as divorces or rent disputes.

“The idea that we would provide to aliens [representation] that we don’t provide to citizens is exceptional in and of itself,” said Ries. “It’s making removable aliens better off than U.S. citizens.”

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