Program to Offer Immigrants Free Legal Aid

As part of a trend, the Beverly Hills Bar Assn. and the Mexican American Bar Assn. unveiled a plan Friday to provide free legal services for some of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans seeking to use a 1997 law to avoid deportation.

The move--announced at the American Bar Assn.’s semiannual meeting in Los Angeles--signals the bar’s mounting focus on immigration issues.

“We have many concerns about the proper representation of immigrants,” said Philip S. Anderson, a Little Rock attorney who is president of the 400,000-member bar.

Tough new laws passed in 1996 have contributed to record increases in deportations and in the number of prisoners held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Nationwide, the bar has committed more than $500,000 in the past year to an effort to recruit and train lawyers to assist immigrants nationwide. The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. has been among the beneficiaries.

The latest plan also underscores the pressing need for legal services as about 300,000 Central Americans in Southern California prepare to file papers under the 1997 law that will probably resolve their long-ambiguous status in one of two ways: They may receive “green cards,” entitling them to remain and work permanently in the United States. Or they will face deportation.

All have been here since at least 1990, having fled their homelands during brutal civil wars that have since ended. Many have bought houses in this country, launched careers and had children.

“I cannot imagine having to go back to Guatemala,” said Mario Rene Giron, a 32-year-old green card applicant who attended the news conference detailing the legal aid program.

Complicating Giron’s case is the fact that he has severe kidney problems and must receive regular dialysis treatments. Such treatments are not widely available in Guatemala, Giron said, and are prohibitively expensive.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t survive back there,” he said.

Giron said he came to the United States in 1987, after his family received death threats arising from his father’s political activity in Guatemala. His father and mother are also seeking permanent residence status.

But to avoid deportation under the 1997 law, the Giron family and hundreds of thousands of other Guatemalans and Salvadorans must prove their expulsion would result in “extreme hardship,” a term that is not specifically defined in law. Congress passed the law in an effort to help clear up the status of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had been living in the United States with temporary permits. Applications can run to hundreds of pages, lawyers said, including affidavits from witnesses, employers, relatives and others.

The great majority of Central Americans are poor or working-class and cannot afford lawyers. Unlike defendants in criminal cases, poor immigrants have no right to publicly financed attorneys to represent them in deportation cases.

Yet experts agree that the presence of counsel greatly increases an immigrant’s chance of avoiding deportation. “Having a lawyer next to you gives you a better shake,” said Linda W. Mazur, president of the Beverly Hills Bar Assn.

Judy London, legal director of the Central American Resource Center, a nonprofit group, hailed the legal establishment’s participation.

But a representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks restrictions on new immigrants, noted that the bar’s efforts paralleled a growth in services paid for by immigrants.

“The immigration bar is obviously a direct beneficiary of the huge demand for immigration status to the United States,” said K.C. McAlpin, the federation’s deputy director. “If they think that immigrants deserve this pro bono service more than Americans who can’t afford legal services, that’s their decision.”

Under the plan announced Friday, the Beverly Hills bar and the Mexican American Bar Assn. will provide pro bono lawyers to clients of the Central American Resource Center, currently overwhelmed with requests from immigrants seeking legal aid. The American Bar Assn. put up $40,000 to cover administrative, coordinating and other costs, and the Mexican American Bar Assn. chipped in an additional $20,000.

The hope is that the volunteer attorneys will provide aid for hundreds of clients.

The American Bar Assn.’s growing interest in this once specialized arena, lawyers said, illustrates a recognition that immigration matters often spill over into other areas. For instance, new laws mean that even longtime green card holders may be deported for relatively minor crimes. Yet many criminal defense lawyers, unaware of such implications, advise clients to accept plea bargains that could lead to their expulsion.