The State : U.S. Must Pay Alien Fees

A federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the government must pay the legal fees of an alien who wins a deportation case if the government’s position in the case was unreasonable. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 8 to 3 in its Monday decision. “Important public policies would suffer if individuals were discouraged from challenging unreasonable governmental conduct” because they could not afford a lawyer, the court said. However, the dissenters said the court should not have decided the issue because the individual alien in the case failed to win his legal claim and was not eligible for fees. The issue is important because of the increasing number of immigration cases, the relative scarcity of immigration lawyers and cutbacks in government funding for legal aid. “People who cannot afford to pay an attorney may be able to get representation now,” said Marc Van Der Hout, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who represented a Salvadoran immigrant in the case.