Legal Aid for Amnesty Applicants Is Extended

Poor immigration amnesty applicants can continue to receive subsidized legal aid until a court determines if a 1986 immigration-reform law intended to deny them that low-cost service, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson on Friday temporarily put off nationwide plans to withhold legal aid from amnesty applicants after finding the law vague and deciding that implementing it could pose a severe hardship on people who face eviction and other civil matters.

At issue is whether Congress meant to include legal aid as well as welfare when it voted to deny “financial assistance” to people seeking citizenship under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

Monday Deadline

The federally funded Legal Services Corp., which grants money to more than 300 local legal aid agencies, said last month that because of the immigration law’s restriction on federal financial aid, it would stop subsidizing civil legal assistance for amnesty applicants as of Monday.

One of the local legal-aid groups that receives federal support, California Rural Legal Assistance, challenged that decision. It and other plaintiffs said legal aid doesn’t fit the congressional intent of “financial assistance” and cannot legally be withheld from otherwise qualified people simply because they are in the amnesty program.

Tim Shea, a Washington lawyer for the Legal Services Corp., argued by speaker phone in an unusual after-hours hearing that Congress did indeed intend to withhold legal aid from amnesty applicants. This intent, he argued, is clear because Congress specifically awarded legal-aid help to a special class of temporary farm workers defined in the law. Congress could have made the same special note for all other amnesty applicants but did not, he said.

Argument Discounted

Stephen P. Berzon, the San Francisco lawyer representing amnesty applicants, discounted that argument, attributing the uncertain language to the last-minute nature of the amendment that discusses temporary workers.

Berzon said that without continued federal aid, as many as several thousand impoverished immigrants could be denied legal advice in such civil matters as spousal abuse, child custody, eviction and the application for “disability or unemployment benefits to sustain their families.”

Henderson set June 8 as the date to decide whether to extend his order.