The government spends tens of millions of dollars annually on a legal assistance program for illegal immigrants facing deportation court hearings, even though the government’s studies show it has hardly any effect on their cases.
What’s worse, the Legal Orientation Program costs even more money because the migrants stayed in custody for as much as seven additional weeks, according to a 2021 study. The combined loss totaled nearly $128 million annually.
The Biden administration “hid” that data from Congress and the public even while asking lawmakers to increase the program’s budget, according to a memo from the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts.
“EOIR continued to seek additional funding for legal orientation programs and repeatedly failed to disclose to [the Department of Justice] or to Congress that it knew that the general LOP was not an effective or economical program,” wrote Sirce E. Owen, who took over at the immigration review office when President Trump took office.
She said hiding the study “was inappropriate and significantly undermined EOIR’s credibility and integrity.”
The scathing memo hasn’t received much attention amid the rest of Mr. Trump’s early moves, but a senior Justice Department official said the Legal Orientation Program’s $28 million annual budget should be an easy, juicy target for Congress or Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The Legal Orientation Program is one of several assistance programs the government funds for illegal immigrants facing deportation. It pays nongovernmental organizations to provide refreshers on rights, such as avenues of defense or how to request release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
That help didn’t affect the outcomes of the cases, though.
A 2018 study found that 76% of those in the Legal Orientation Program were ordered deported, nearly the same rate as the 78% of removal orders for those who weren’t in the program. Roughly 10% of those in the Legal Orientation Program won their cases or had them closed without a deportation order, similar to the 9% rate for those not participating.
Ms. Owen said the 2021 study reaffirmed the 2018 report’s data and added to it.
It concluded that those who were part of the Legal Orientation Program were detained at a higher rate and stayed in custody far longer than those who didn’t take part.
In 2017, the average Legal Orientation Program migrant who was detained stayed in custody for 155 days, compared with 104 days for a migrant not in the program. Participants who won release were in custody for 89 days, compared with 55 days for those who weren’t.
“If this was not making any difference in the outcome and only making cases take longer, why did they continue to advocate on behalf of the program when it was interfering with the publicly declared backlog and making it longer?” said Matthew O’Brien, a former immigration judge who is now with the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
He said the Biden administration had a close relationship with the immigration activist groups that provide the Legal Orientation Program’s services.
“It seems pretty clear based on this memo is what was going on is they were funneling all this money into these programs to screw the taxpayer,” Mr. O’Brien said.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Washington Times.
Neither did the American Immigration Council, a defender of the Legal Orientation Program.
The Acacia Center for Justice, a major participant in the program, responded to inquiries by pointing to a paragraph in the 2021 study that offered caveats to the conclusions about ineffectiveness.
“EOIR would need to conduct additional, rigorous analysis to draw definitive conclusions regarding any potential causal factors,” the 2021 study said.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review receives less attention than the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement agencies, but experts say the immigration courts are significant bottlenecks in the deportation pipeline.
As of last month, the agency had 4 million pending cases. It is adding cases to its docket faster than it can clear them. In 2024, it added 1.8 million cases and completed only about 700,000.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatened to nix the Legal Orientation Program in 2018 but backed off after pressure from Congress and immigration advocacy groups.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge now with the Center for Immigration Studies, said the new memo could signify that the Trump administration plans to hit the program again.
“The only reason that I can think of to release this memo now is they want to abrogate the contracts they have with legal services providers,” he said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.