It’s not required for immigrants to have a lawyer as they navigate immigration court. But people are far more likely to win their cases — and not get deported — with one.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Renata Daou to discuss her article, “A lack of immigration lawyers in CT means big court backlogs,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Renata’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Renata. You say a shortage of judges and immigration court staff has been an issue during the Biden administration, but it hasn’t been discussed much since President Trump ramped up his mass deportation policy. So what prompted you to do this analysis, and what do the numbers show?
RD: So it wasn’t much of a matter who the president was when I started doing the analysis. It was last year that I went to a self-representation clinic that groups were hosting in Hartford, in a church. So I just went, kind of like, to see what it was about. And when I was there, I was talking to the people who were hosting the clinic and the lawyers that were there, and I was like, ‘Oh, why are you doing this? How many people are usually coming?’ And I was just chatting with them. And, one thing that they told me that caught my attention was that they were doing this because a lot of these people who are coming to the clinics wanted to be represented by lawyers, but they couldn’t find anyone available, or they didn’t have the money to afford a lawyer. But this clinic is free, so that was an option for them.
And one of the lawyers that I was talking to was quite frustrated, because she was like, there are too many people. Like, I cannot handle more cases than I already have. There are way more people than like, and all of us can. Even if we try to take as many people as we can, it’s just impossible. So I was wondering if that is a problem across Connecticut? Is this a Hartford problem? I remembered that last year, the problem seemed to be a bit worse. I remember that Connecticut was like, maybe, like 12, in the ranking of not being represented. So it was actually worse last year than it is this year. So I remember that I looked at that and I was like, wow, that wasn’t like something that I really expected for Connecticut. I didn’t know that there was, like the shortage. So I just started talking to a bunch of different lawyers about their experience. Looked at the data like and that’s how it came to be.
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PODCAST: Immigration lawyer shortage puts pressure on CT’s courts
