On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as “no longer needed.” Among them was the little-known National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP), which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.
The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35-million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400 cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.
The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”
The planned defunding was the latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid for immigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.
Finally, on April 25, the Justice Department dealt the final blow, notifying the Acacia Center for Justice of its decision to cancel the discretionary nationwide initiative that immigrant rights advocates, attorneys, and former immigration judges say is a lifeline for hundreds, if not thousands, of detained people in immigration proceedings. With the exception of detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington—where court-ordered government-appointed counsel provisions remain in place—advocates anticipate these especially vulnerable immigrants will go unidentified and unrepresented, left to face potential deportation without a fighting chance.
“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention with no end in sight,” said Lisa Okamoto, program director for the NQRP at the Acacia Center for Justice, “or without understanding what they are facing.” Without federal funding, immigration attorneys are unlikely to take on these highly complex cases since most detainees, many of whom are held in remote detention centers where pro bono assistance is hard to come by, can’t afford legal representation. (The EOIR declined to comment on the termination of the program.)
“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention without no end in sight, or without understanding what they are facing.”
“To think of those people behind bars without anybody telling them where they are or why they are there or what might happen to them…” she said, pausing as her voice became emotional. “And then the serious risk of them being put on a plane and possibly even sent to a country they have no ties to.”
The nationwide government-appointed counsel program was created in 2013 in response to a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit and settlement order in Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder that established the right to legal representation for immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington, who have been deemed “incompetent” by an immigration judge to properly defend themselves.
One of the named plaintiffs in the case was José Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Mexican man with an intellectual disability. A psychological report had found that his cognitive functions resembled those of a toddler. An immigration judge requested a psychiatric evaluation of Franco-Gonzalez, which concluded that he had no idea what kind of court he was appearing in and it would be “impossible for him to stand trial.”
The judge agreed that Franco-Gonzalez’s case couldn’t move forward without legal representation and decided to put it on hold. But Franco-Gonzalez remained in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without another day in court. Talia Inlender, then a young lawyer giving “know-your- rights” presentations to immigrant detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail, had learned about his case from an ICE officer. When she met him in late 2009, he had been detained for almost five years. Franco-Gonzalez couldn’t sign his own name to join Inlender’s workshop.
Even today, Inlender, now the deputy director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, still remembers her first encounter with Franco-Gonzalez. She said his skin looked almost translucent from the lengthy confinement period and he was practically nonverbal. He didn’t know his birthday or age. And, he had little understanding of his situation other than wanting to be reunited with his family members, many of whom were US citizens and lawful permanent residents.
In early 2010, Inlender’s organization at the time, Public Counsel, and the ACLU sued on behalf of Franco-Gonzalez and another detainee, both of whom were “effectively lost” in the system. Franco-Gonzalez was released from detention three days later. (He went on to become a naturalized US citizen.) “But we knew he wasn’t the only one suffering in immigration detention solely as a result of a mental disability,” Inlender said. Around that time, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Deportation By Default” noting that people with mental illnesses made up an estimated 15 percent of the detained immigrant population.
So they expanded the case to a class action lawsuit to cover detainees whose conditions—including schizophrenia, severe depression, and dissociative identity disorder—might prevent them from having a fair day in court. In Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the courts found that detained immigrants with mental disabilities facing deportation were entitled to counsel as a reasonable accommodation based on the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, that was the “only means” by which someone not competent for self-representation could exercise their rights.
On April 23, 2013, a federal district judge in California issued a permanent injunction requiring the government to appoint a qualified representative to those immigrants and to grant a bond hearing to detainees who had been in custody for six months or more. The permanent injunction only applied to the three states covered by the lawsuit. But just the day before that injunction, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy to “enhance procedural protections,” including processes for mental health screenings and competency hearings, throughout the country.
Today, that nationwide program is being gutted. “I know firsthand the difference it makes to have a fair hearing with a lawyer by your side,” Inlender said. “I think it’s just a devastating blow to due process and to all of the individual people and families that are going to be deeply impacted by the termination.”
Amelia Wilson, a law professor and director of the immigration justice clinic at Pace University who served as the NQRP’s program manager from 2016 to 2018, described the program as a “massive seismic change.” Wilson had been involved in deportation defense work on behalf of immigrants with mental health issues for years. Prior to 2013, she said, it was a “hodgepodge system.” She used to get “clandestine calls from immigration judges” alerting her to unrepresented immigrants on their dockets who needed assistance. Sometimes the information about a potential client came from a DHS attorney or guards in detention centers. “I would take cases that would just appear before me,” she said. “But there was no referral system.”
The rollout of the nationwide policy program was imperfect, Wilson said. But it was an opportunity to offer life-saving legal services, in a formalized way, to more people who otherwise would have been unlikely to receive them. By the time she left, the program had been implemented in 25 locations outside of the original Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction and, as of 2024, more than 2,500 immigrants had been given legal counsel through it.
“We could fund not just the attorney but also social workers, experts, post-release planning so if the person was going to be released on bond or if they won their case, it wasn’t just like, here, open the doors, goodbye, good luck,” Wilson said. Most immigration judges were receptive to, if not enthusiastic about, the initiative. “It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”
“It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”
Detained immigrants in removal proceedings, especially those who are unrepresented, already face an uphill battle. Unlike in the criminal justice system where someone is considered innocent until proven guilty, immigrants seeking relief bear the burden to prove their case. To be found credible, they usually have to recount past events in detail. For people with dementia, for example, or experiencing memory issues due to traumatic brain injury, that alone can present an obstacle.
Gregory Pleasants, a lawyer who worked in the creation of the government-appointed counsel program, said immigrants with mental health needs were often detained indefinitely and subject to solitary confinement. As a result, their conditions only worsened. “Predictably,” Pleasants said, “people who are detained with mental illness just got deported without being heard by a system that is primarily designed to deny detain and deport.”
Pleasants recalled a former client with schizophrenia who had a recurring delusion about something he called a “re-existence plan.” Eventually, after spending time with the man and his family, Pleasants was able to gather information helpful to the case, and the client was allowed to stay in the United States. “No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court, especially one as draconian as the immigration system,” Pleasants said. “Without a lawyer, people don’t have a prayer. They don’t have a chance in hell.”
What the NQRP did was build an infrastructure of skilled lawyers, paralegals, and social workers equipped to provide meaningful and trauma-informed detention and deportation defense. For Pleasants, it represented a “brief gleaming moment” of promise that due process could be realized in the immigration system. The dismantling of the program means “that promise is slipping out of our hands,” he added, “and that’s a grievous loss.”
On May 5, nine legal service providers filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s partial termination of the government-paid counsel program. The organizations argue they are faced with an “untenable choice” between having to withdraw representation from some of the roughly 100 affected NQRP cases or continuing the work without payment. Alternatively, they might have to move funds from other critical services and risk staff layoffs.
“We are not talking about a huge amount of money, especially relative to some of the other programs,” said Evan Benz, a senior attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the only subcontractor providing legal services under the program across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina. “But these resources make all the difference in these individuals’ lives because without this program there’s no realistic way that they would ever have a competent and qualified attorney to represent them in their case.”
Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, has represented somewhere between 20 and 30 NQRP clients in her nine years as a qualified representative. Often, she explained, these types of cases are more time and resource-intensive because of the added challenges of obtaining testimony, collecting evidence, and doing cross-examination. Lawyers may need to rely more heavily on forensic psychology and country condition expert reports, both of which incur expenses.
Some of Lunn’s clients have experienced audio and visual hallucinations that prevent them from knowing what’s real and what’s not. These symptoms are further exacerbated by prolonged detention. “Imagine trying to synthesize an immigration case while dealing with those types of external stimuli,” Lunn said. Without legal counsel, people will lose in court not because they lack a strong case, but because they simply can’t present the information needed to an immigration judge.
In some instances, someone’s claim to stay in the United States is based on their disability and how it could make them susceptible to harm or even persecution if they are deported back to their home country. Lately, Lunn has been thinking a lot about one of her clients from South Sudan, a survivor of the civil war who became an orphan as a child. As a result of severe PTSD, he heard voices of people threatening to kill him. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the United States. “If he had been flown back there,” Lunn said, “I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been targeted and he would have been killed.”
That man is just one of many people Lunn and her organization have helped over the years. She chokes up thinking about those immigrants whose needs may prompt an immigration judge to determine they should be appointed counsel, only for there not to be anyone available to ensure they have a shot at a reasonably fair process. And she wonders: How much longer can they keep assisting their current clients? The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which had anticipated more than $310,000 in funding through the NQRP for 2025, has 15 clients whose legal counsel falls under the now-stricken program.
“People have survived so much in their lives to get to the place where a court appoints a qualified representative for them,” Lunn said. “It’s just heartbreaking to think about them being alone again.”
