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The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) is pleased to announce the launch of a new project devoted to improving the quality and coordination of immigration litigation before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, with a special emphasis on improving access to the court for indigent and detained immigrants. Generous funding for the Project's start up has been provided to ILCM by the National Immigrant Justice Center through its Detention, Democracy, and Due Process Project (D3P). Additional support will be sought to broaden the reach and impact of this important project. ILCM has contracted with local immigration attorney Benjamin Casper to direct the project and we are already litigating our first cases.
This project is a response to Bush Administration policies that have fundamentally transformed the landscape of immigration litigation over the past eight years, causing an unprecedented flood of immigration appeals into the federal circuit courts. These controversial policies transformed the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and undermined the BIA's ability to provide immigrants with meaningful administrative review of their cases. As a consequence, the BIA now commonly issues summary decisions affirming the deportation orders entered by immigration judges, providing little or no explanation of the reasons for rejecting the immigrant's appeal. The dismantling of the BIA has left thousands of immigrants with nowhere to seek genuine appellate review but the federal circuit courts of appeals. The dramatic increase of appeals flowing into the circuit courts has given them a far more prominent role in shaping immigration law than was true just a few years ago. The caseload of immigration appeals for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has risen dramatically. In 2000, it considered only 15 immigration cases, but since 2004 it has on average decided over 90 cases per year. At the same time, circuit court judges have commented on the often poor quality of BIA's decisions. [1]
Unfortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has been widely noted as one of the least receptive courts when it comes to the claims of immigrants. ILCM's new project will seek to enhance the quality of representation available to individual immigrants before the court, with the long-term goal of winning more positive decisions and building more favorable law for our entire immigrant community. We will do this by:
(1) Providing high-quality representation to indigent or detained immigrants with meritorious claims to litigate before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, with priority being given to cases that present important legal questions of potentially broad impact to the larger immigrant community.
(2) Increasing the number of practitioners who can more effectively litigate cases before Eighth Circuit both through CLE trainings, and by mentoring ILCM attorneys as well as pro bono volunteer attorneys;
(3) Improving both the coordination and quality of immigration litigation within the Eighth Circuit by tracking cases pending before the court, disseminating information about important legal developments, and identifying important issues of immigration law that are ripe for litigation in the circuit.
ILCM looks forward to providing this important and long overdue legal service to the immigrant and refugee community and to engendering more equitable immigration decisions within the Eighth Circuit. Our first Continuing Legal Education training will be in March 2009. Please contact John Keller for further information.
[1] In one much publicized case, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, after noting that his court had reversed 40 percent of the BIA decisions it reviewed during a one-year period, concluded that "the adjudication of these cases at the administrative level has fallen below the minimum standards of legal justice." Benslimane v. Gonzalez, 430 F.3d 828, 830 (7th Cir. 2005).