25-07-2025
More immigrants will fight deportations alone as Trump ramps up enforcement
Immigrants are finding it increasingly hard to find legal representation as the Trump administration ramps up deportation proceedings.
The big picture: An expected surge in new federal funding could supercharge both arrests and deportations at a time when immigration attorneys are already struggling to keep up with their day-to-day casework.
Deportation is a civil sanction, not criminal, so immigrants are not automatically entitled to a government-appointed attorney if they can't afford representation.
By the numbers: Roughly 49% of people facing deportation nationwide have no attorney to advise them of their rights, according to the June data from Vera Institute for Justice.
In the top three states with the most immigration cases pending, Florida, California and Texas, representation rates vary wildly.
In Florida and Texas, 25.1% and 24.5% of all pending cases are likely to have legal representation, where as in California, there's a 63.9% chance of retaining an attorney, according to nationwide released data by Syracuse University in June.
Case in point: Immigrants have a much higher likelihood of winning their cases when they have an attorney present. In January 2025, 77% of people facing deportation for entering the country illegally who had an attorney to represent them were permitted to remain in the U.S., a report by the Vera Institute for Justice found.
Of the more than 340,000 people who were removed from the country in the 12 months prior to January 2025, 79% lacked representation.
Driving the news: The immigration funding included in the newly passed "One Big Beautiful Bill" could significantly increase ICE's detention capabilities, Axios' April Rubin reported.
The bill allocates $29.9 billion to fund hiring, training and retention of ICE officers, agents and support staff.
An additional $4.1 billion is apportioned for hiring and training Border Patrol agents, Customs and Border Protection officials and others.
Some $45 billion goes towards building new adult detention and family residential centers, which could result in at least 116,000 additional beds, according to a report from the American Immigration Council.
Friction point: Earlier this year, the Trump administration ended five federally-funded legal service programs that provided basic due process information and education to immigrants facing removal proceedings without an attorney, compounding the shortage.
The administration decided that two of the orientation programs providing due process information should be in-sourced, which advocates say is at odds with the administration's goals of deporting record numbers of people as quickly as possible.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the orientation programs, declined to comment.
Yes, but: Some non-profit organizations say they're experiencing a "Trump bump" in volunteers who are motivated by the administration's immigration crackdown.
Professor Alberto Benítez, who ran George Washington University's Immigration Clinic for 29 years, said he's been experiencing an increase of interest in students wanting to study law this year, similar to a rise in interest studied by the American Bar Association during Trump's first term.
"An unintended consequence of this man's policies is that he's generating outrage at the violations of the law and of human rights generally," Benítez said. "And law students want to do something about it."
The bottom line: "We are still providing as much education and intake and referrals as we can," Michael Lukens, executive director for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights said. "And we're not going to stop."
