BridgeTower Media Newswires
BOSTON — After her home country’s court system failed to protect her from a man who abused her physically and verbally, a 29-year-old Guatemalan woman flees to the United States with her two sons, ages 9 and 3.
Another victim of domestic violence arrives at the border with her disabled 15-year-old, joining her 9-year-old who had come to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor after gang members in El Salvador threatened him.
The two asylum-seeking families are among nearly 15,000 whose cases had been assigned to the “Dedicated Docket” of Boston’s Immigration Court by the end of 2021, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Like most of the parties in the over 72,000 cases that had been assigned to the Dedicated Docket, those families have yet to secure legal representation.
But the American Bar Association hopes it can help improve the situation. The ABA recently launched its Pro Bono Matters for Families Facing Deportation website, which features listings of asylum seekers in need of attorneys culled by legal services providers on the ground in the Dedicated Docket jurisdictions.
Visitors to the website can read details about the cases and then fill out a short form to raise their hand to volunteer as the asylum seeker’s counsel or at least explore the possibility further.
In Boston, the ABA’s partners are Catholic Charities of Boston and its managing attorney for Immigration Court legal orientation programs, Elizabeth A. McCarthy.
Jointly announced by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas and U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in May, the Dedicated Docket process was designed to expedite the immigration cases of families arriving between ports of entry at the southwest border of the U.S.
Boston was not among the initial list of 10 cities with established communities of legal services providers and available judges to manage the cases placed on the Dedicated Docket. But since being added to the roster, Boston has made up for lost time, trailing only Miami in the number of notices to appear issued by Customs and Border Protection, according to TRAC.
While there are 11 Dedicated Docket cities, four — Miami, Boston, New York and Newark, New Jersey — account for more than three-quarters of the cases (76.4 percent) as of the end of 2021, TRAC reports.
TRAC found that half of those admitted into the Dedicated Docket come from only three countries: Brazil, Ecuador and Honduras. More than three out of four Brazilian nationals on the Dedicated Docket (77 percent) have been assigned to the Boston court, according to TRAC.
“This concentration may reflect the timing of when the major surge of these nationality groups were assigned into the program, and the administration’s practice of sending waves to specific cities rather than distributing them evenly among the 11 cities with Dedicated Dockets,” TRAC writes in its recent report.
Concurrently with launching the Dedicated Docket program, the Biden administration set a goal of resolving the cases within 300 days from their initial master calendar hearing. TRAC calls that “ambitious,” given that the average asylum seeker has had to wait nearly four and a half years for Immigration Court hearings to resolve their cases.
While such prolonged delays are not ideal for either the system or the migrants, TRAC notes that “rocket dockets” carry their own problems. Chief among those problems is that if an asylum seeker does not have time to obtain an attorney and get their documentation in order, judges may be rushed into making less-than-fully-informed decisions.
Yet many on the Dedicated Docket are confronting that consequence, according to TRAC. The center found that, as of year’s end, only 15.5 percent of asylum seekers on the Dedicated Docket had secured attorneys.
Even looking at migrants who have had the longest time to secure counsel, only 45 percent of cases in the program since its first full month of operation last June have an attorney on record, as opposed to the 91.1 percent of asylum seekers who had lawyers and whose cases were resolved on the regular docket during the same period.
While the Biden administration boasted that “fairness will not be compromised” by expediting cases on the Dedicated Docket, there is one disturbing early data point: Of the 1,557 asylum seekers on the Dedicated Docket who had received deportation orders by the end of 2021, only 75 — just 4.7 percent — had representation, TRAC says.
The government also seems to be drowning in Dedicated Docket paperwork. One in every 10 Dedicated Docket cases had been dismissed by the end of last year because the notice to appear had not reached the court by the time the first hearing was scheduled, depriving the court of jurisdiction, TRAC found.
Such due process concerns motivated the ABA to intervene, says Adonia R. Simpson, director of policy and pro bono.
“I do think we have opportunity right now to be doing more virtual pro bono, between the ability to appear via WebEx with the court and being able to engage with clients via WhatsApp and Zoom and all these other ways,” she says. “We thought there was real opportunity to raise this as a pro bono opportunity nationally.”
The ABA bided its time as the legal services providers were staffing up and building the capability to identify appropriate cases for pro bono placement. But now that there are a substantial number of cases on the website, the ABA is ready to spread the word about it and will be monitoring traffic to see how well it is working, Simpson says.
“We’re very hopeful that we do see a lot of interest,” she says.
