Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.

By: Allison Posner

CLINIC welcomes the Obama Administration’s August 18^th announcement that the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice will be working together to re-assess and prioritize the hundreds of thousands of pending removal cases.  In addition to providing temporary relief from imminent deportation to those individuals whose cases will be administratively closed,  this interagency review will cut into the severe backlog that plagues our immigration court system, reducing the wait times for individual cases to be adjudicated. 

By: Ann Atalla*

National Pro Bono Week has arrived, and there is no better time to focus on lending a helping hand to immigrants who cannot afford legal representation.  With all of the news coverage this October about the ailing economy, it goes without saying that our immigrant population suffers with the rest of the country.  In fiscal year 2009, the Department of Justice calculated that up to 61% of immigrants in deportation proceedings could not afford legal representation before the nation’s immigration courts, and 23% were left to their own devices before the Board of Immigration Appeals.  Thankfully, CLINIC has ample opportunities to assist this population and work on reducing these bleak statistics.

By: Hiroko Kusuda, Helen Chen, and James Porter

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Southeast Louisiana ravaging parishes, towns, and cities across the Gulf Coast.  When the levees broke that protected the city of New Orleans from the surrounding waterways, 80% of the city wound up under water.  The city has begun to rebound with the population at 90% of its pre-Katrina numbers.   This year, CLINIC had its annual convening in downtown New Orleans, and it was a major success.

By: James Porter

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an asylum seeker is “a person who has left their country of origin, has applied for recognition as a refugee in another country, and is awaiting a decision on their application.”  There is often much attention paid to refugees by those in the nonprofit sector.  However, asylum seekers are unique from refugees and face unique challenges of their own such as detention in the U.S. and the uncertainty of the asylum adjudication process. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has finally released the results of a months-long review of its detention system. The report and its recommendations support what advocates have said for years: DHS should stop operating its immigration detention system like the criminal justice system.

In October 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a poultry plant in Greenville, SC. More than 300 individuals were arrested and a humanitarian and legal crisis erupted.

One of the most easily and commonly overlooked groups of immigrants are detainees. Every day, more than 32,000 individuals languish in detention facilities scattered across the country, unnoticed and ignored.  Thousands of these detainees are immigrants fleeing persecution and seeking refuge in the United States.