Expanding appellate representation for formerly incarcerated non-citizens

Immigrant and Refugee Support

County of Los Angeles

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

AOL staff are national leaders in the field of immigration law. AOL was founded in 2015 and has provided free legal services to indigent immigrants since then. AOL's staff have years of experience screening immigrant clients for relief eligibility and supporting detained immigrants as they leave detention or who have been formerly incarcerated by the DHS. We engage in appellate representation of formerly incarcerated individuals before the Board of Immigration Appeals and Ninth Circuit. Using our legal expertise, we identify appealable legal issues and work with our clients to raise these issues on appeal. AOL staff are not only experts on the legal complexities of navigating immigration appeals for formerly incarcerated immigrants, but also our staff includes formerly incarcerated individuals who bring first-hand lived experience to our work. AOL staff have decades of combined experience connecting clients with non-legal resources to ensure holistic, humane case management.

AOL represents formerly incarcerated immigrants in appellate matters before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and the Ninth Circuit. Far too often, incarcerated immigrants are forced to go through their removal proceedings pro se, or unrepresented, on a detained docket that moves at a rapid pace. Given the fact that they are incarcerated in facilities that are often hundreds of miles away from city centers and access to high-quality legal representation and resources they need to successfully pursue their claims, detained immigrants tend to have high rates of denial in their cases. Often, the issue on which the individual's claim was denied is appealable. The appeals process at both the BIA and the Ninth Circuit moves very slowly, and detained immigrants may bail out of custody while the appeal is pending. Appellate representation is time-consuming and onerous, and we currently have limited capacity to engage significantly in the appellate process. However, we want to ensure our formerly incarcerated clients have dedicated representation in this legal area as it can literally make the difference between being deported back to harm and persecution or remaining lawfully in the United States. This grant would support our goal of drastically increasing high-quality appellate representation for formerly incarcerated individuals by assigning a dedicated Staff Attorney to do this work as their sole focus.

In working closely with detained immigrants, we have witnessed firsthand how often the legal cases of detained non-citizens seeking safety or relief from deportation are denied. Given Los Angeles County's proximity to the United States-Mexico border and numerous immigration detention centers, it is a place where many immigrants find themselves after leaving detention while a final decision in their immigration cases remains pending. The appeals process can take months if not years, and non-citizens with pending appeals are left in a sort of anxious limbo. Expanding our holistic legal representation, which includes both zealous legal representation in the appellate process as well as connecting our clients with resources such as healthcare, food, shelter, and other necessities, will ensure that Los Angeles County is a more humane, dignified place for vulnerable immigrants fighting deportation to live.

AOL has the capacity to track qualitative and quantitative measures of success and impact. Quantitative measures employed are tracking the completion of intakes, case filings, case outcomes, social services support, and case management progress points as defined by our internal metrics. AOL also tracks demographic data, application type, and other metrics as required for grant reporting. Qualitatively, we consider legal services to be a formalized form of storytelling, and we build our collective knowledge through sharing our observations, the experiences we hear from clients and their families and communities, and other narratives that inform our process and outcomes. In the appellate realm, we have obtained successful outcomes in 8 appeals and currently have 7 Board of Immigration Appeals ("BIA") appeals pending, 4 petitions for review pending, and 3 motions pending with the BIA.