New York City officials are calling the decision a "defense fund" against President Donald Trump's immigration policies.
“This emergency funding will help us provide more attorneys to New Yorkers in need,” Johnson said, according to the Daily News. “This is crucial right now as the ICE deportation machine has ramped up efforts to interfere with the necessary work NYIFUP [New York Immigrant Family Unity Project] is doing by pushing people through the system with zero regard for due process. I will continue to fight these un-American and horrific immigration policies.”
Currently, $10 million is allocated for public attorneys who work on immigration cases for the fiscal year. However, public defenders in the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project say the additional $1.6 million "emergency funds" are needed, saying courts have been rushing deportation proceedings.
The attorneys also requested an extra $6.6 million for the next fiscal year, citing the addition of immigration courts in New York aimed at addressing a growing backlog of deportation cases, the Daily News reported.
“All respondents have a right to counsel at no expense to the government," the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which operates the courts, said. "EOIR has long worked to improve access to legal information and counseling and increase the level of representation for individuals appearing before the immigration courts and Board of Immigration Appeals.”
Two new courtrooms are currently in operation and additional judges will be appointed later this spring, a spokesman for EOIR said, according to the Daily News.
Illegal immigrants facing deportation do not have the right to an attorney if they cannot afford one, unlike American citizens in a criminal court. However, many non-profits provide illegal immigrants with pro-bono attorneys. The additional funding is aiming to fill that gap and, according to the Daily News, public attorneys defending illegal immigrants in deportation proceedings are being adopted around the country.
Deportation Could Take Years
Illegal immigrants already slated for deportation remain for years in the country before they are finally removed, government data shows. There were more than one million illegal aliens with final orders of removal in the country as of June 2, 2018, according to data obtained through a freedom of information request from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, an anti-mass immigration advocacy law firm.This means even when a person is ordered to be deported, it would still take ICE about four years on average to actually remove him or her from the United States. In addition, there are more than 1.1 million people who have a pending final order, Conservative Review reported, meaning they’ve been slated for deportation but have likely appealed their case to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals, the appellate body of the immigration court system.