In April, the Trump administration cut funding for a program that provided legal aid to immigrants with serious mental health conditions who were detained and facing deportation. The move has left attorneys scrambling to keep serving clients for whom they say legal representation can be a matter of life or death.
For one young man, the prospect of navigating immigration court without an attorney while dealing with a mental health crisis felt impossible. In 2023, he was transferred from a county jail in North Dakota to immigration detention and was facing deportation to Liberia, a country he had fled when he was just 4 years old. After he was held in solitary confinement, his symptoms of bipolar disorder and depression got worse, making it hard for him to answer questions in court or even understand the judge’s instructions.
“I was in shock. It really crushed me,” he said in a phone call. The Marshall Project isn’t publishing his name, at his request, because of his immigration status. “I just felt insignificant. I didn’t feel like I had much hope.”
A judge ruled the man was mentally unfit to appear alone in court and appointed him a lawyer. That attorney gathered enough evidence to convince the judge that the man, who is transgender, would be subject to extreme danger if deported to Liberia, where people who identify as LGBTQ can face severe discrimination and violence. His lawyer also argued that the criminal convictions that had landed him in immigration custody had been a result of mental illness, addiction and homelessness.
The program, known as the National Qualified Representative Program, has provided legal support to roughly 3,000 people since it began in 2013. Legal groups are now suing the government over its termination. In the meantime, many detainees with mental health disorders or serious cognitive disabilities are on their own.
“There’s no longer the thinnest layer of protection these people had through legal service providers,” said Lisa Okamoto of the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which had run the program under a Justice Department contract since 2022. Along with people with mental illness, the program served immigrants with dementia, traumatic brain injuries and other intellectual disabilities, Okamoto said.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, declined to comment.
The announcement has forced lawyers who contracted with the program to either abandon their clients or try to take on their complicated, expensive cases for free. Alongside legal fees, the cases often require paying outside psychologists, social workers, and other experts, and traveling to far-flung detention centers.
“If I stay, I will have to take on the financial burden of representing this person, and that could put me tens of thousands of dollars in debt,” said Sophie Woodruff, a Louisiana immigration attorney who has represented clients through the program for nearly a decade. “Or I could withdraw, and then I'm throwing this person to the wolves.” She is now looking for private donors to fund her work.
One of her clients, she said, is actively suicidal. “These are the most vulnerable people, and we are stripping them of any modicum of due process,” she said. “The consequences of this are life or death.”
Eight months after he was locked up, the man from Liberia was released from custody as a legal permanent resident. He is still waiting for his green card to arrive. Without an attorney, “I would have been sent back for sure,” he said. “And I knew that if I was sent back, I wouldn’t have made it.”
In criminal court, you have a right to an attorney, even if you can’t afford one. But in an immigration hearing, which is a civil proceeding, there is no such guarantee, even though the stakes of deportation can be just as high as someone facing a prison sentence. The majority of immigrants in detention have to navigate the court system without a lawyer to represent them.
In his first five months in office, President Trump has attempted to end many programs that provide legal support to immigrants. That includes lawyers for children who arrive as unaccompanied minors, and a longstanding legal orientation program that explains to people how court proceedings work. Legal groups are challenging both cuts in court. Trump advisor Stephen Miller also recently said the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus for immigrants, which would deny them the ability to challenge their detention.
“These all have the same objective, which is to strip immigrants of their rights in court,” said former immigration judge Sarah Burr. “The idea that this would somehow speed up the process is ridiculous. It's only going to slow it down.”
Burr said that forcing someone to appear in court without an attorney makes it a judge’s responsibility to ensure someone understands what is happening and can make decisions in their case. “That takes a long time,” she said. “You’re being put in an awkward position. You almost become a party instead of the judge.”
Unlike in a criminal setting, where the prosecution must prove your guilt, the burden of proof in an immigration case is primarily on the person fighting their removal. That makes representation even more important, said Gregory Pleasants, an attorney who has represented many clients with serious mental illness and helped create the program. “You have to meet a legal burden,” he said. “You have to present evidence. If you’re too ill to understand what’s going on, much less attack the government’s case, then you don’t have a prayer.”
The initiative started in 2013, just before a federal court ruling found that the government must provide attorneys to immigrants who couldn’t represent themselves due to a serious mental disorder. The lead plaintiff in the case, José Antonio Franco González, had been stuck in immigration detention for nearly five years while his case went nowhere. Due to intellectual disabilities, he had the mental capacity of a 2-year-old, according to experts.
The order applied to immigrants detained only in Arizona, Washington and California. But the Justice Department created a program to provide such services across the country. The department actually expanded the initiative during the first Trump administration, until it was eventually operating in every immigration court in the country serving detainees. The recent program cuts only affect immigrants who are detained outside those three states, as the court order still stands.
Attorneys say they fear more immigrants will now end up lost in the system. These cases can often drag on for years, when someone is too ill to proceed with their case, but immigration officials are unwilling to release them. Pleasants represented one man with schizophrenia who was detained for almost four years, he said, while the case stalled. A current client has been locked up for 18 months, during which he’s been held in solitary confinement and hospitalized twice.
“He’s often not oriented to where he is or what time it is or what date it is,” he said. “He is often not able to respond in a way that makes coherent sense. If you keep him detained, he’s going to get worse.”
Along with defending someone from deportation, lawyers also monitored their clients’ detention conditions. This role matters even more, advocates say, as Trump curtails federal watchdog agencies. Attorneys can help ensure someone is accessing their medication, for example, or isn’t locked in solitary confinement. The Liberian man said he was denied his prescribed testosterone while in detention, until his attorney pressured the facility to provide it.
Nonprofits that provided legal services through the program have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that cutting the program was an arbitrary decision with “devastating and irreparable consequences.” Before the program, “mentally incompetent individuals who were U.S. citizens were wrongly deported because they did not have access to counsel and were therefore effectively unable to prove their citizenship,” the complaint states.
On Friday, the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the court doesn’t have the authority to force the government to continue the contract. The government also contended that judges in immigration cases “may directly question witnesses themselves…[or] permit a guardian, family member, or close friend to participate in the proceedings” as alternatives to providing counsel.
For the man from Liberia, the program’s support didn’t end after he won his case. When he was released from immigration detention last summer, social workers helped him obtain health insurance and connect with a mental health provider near his family. Now, he’s one year sober, working full-time, and going back to school. “I’ve lived in this country my whole life. I consider myself American,” he said. “If the program ends, there's going to be a lot of people thrown into the same situation that I was, but with nobody to advocate for them.”