Dane County immigration lawyer center wants to expand, help more people facing deportation

MADISON, Wis. (WMDX) – A Dane County resource to help immigrants navigate the legal system has been swamped for the last few months, and now they’re hoping to expand. 

“So many people going through the system [are] being moved to detention centers in Louisiana and Kentucky just immediately, they can’t find a lawyer, their family doesn’t even know where they are,” said Grant Sovern, President of the board of the Community Immigration Law Center. “That has been a real crisis.”

The Community Immigration Law Center, abbreviated as CILC and pronounced “silk”, operates like a public defender resource for people who need immigration lawyers. 

Immigration Court: No Criminal Charges, No Lawyer Provided

Immigration offenses are civil cases, not criminal. Because the cases are not criminal, folks facing immigration charges are not given a lawyer if they can’t afford one. 

“We all know what a public defender is. If you can’t afford one, you certainly shouldn’t go to jail simply because you can’t afford a lawyer,” Sovern said. “That’s exactly what happens in the immigration context. You can sit in detention, which is a jail, for six months, a year, 18 months.”

They’ve been busy since the Trump administration ramped up efforts to deport people, and deport them quickly. The only ICE detention facility in Wisconsin is in Juneau. Immigrations & Customs Enforcement rents out space in the Dodge Detention Facility. 

“We go there periodically, just to see if people are there and have been picked up for immigration. And all of their 200 beds seem to be full with immigrants these days,” Sovern said. 

New York City leaders authorized a study on how legal representation, and lack thereof, impacts immigrants’ cases and outcomes. It found that people were vastly more likely to win their cases and avoid deportation if they had a lawyer. 

“The impact of having counsel cannot be overstated: people facing deportation in New York immigration courts with a lawyer are 500 percent as likely to win their cases as those without representation,” read the report. 

It showed that people who were not detained and had a lawyer were 25 times more likely to win their case than people who were detained at the conclusion of their case and did not have a lawyer.

“It because the lawyers were getting around some law or finding a loophole,” Sovern said. “It was because somebody is actually applying the law, which nobody had done before.” 

After those findings, officials started and funded a program to give people in immigration court in New York a lawyer. It was the first program of its kind in the nation.

Dane County’s Community Immigration Law Center became the second.

“We all want the rules to apply to everybody”

Because civil immigration cases often mirror the process of criminal ones, Sovern equated the two. Having a lawyer to defend you means someone is interpreting the law on your behalf, not just the government’s. CILC exists to ensure everyone gets due process. 

“I think everybody wants to live in a community where we’re doing right by people. We have rules. We all want the rules to apply to everybody, and we want them to apply to everybody evenly,” he said. “We’re not asking for an outcome. We’re just asking for the rules to be applied.”

Sovern said there’s only a small handful of lawyers in the state who have experience applying immigration law. 

“In Wisconsin, there’s probably maybe 10 or 15 lawyers who know how to do deportation defense, because it hasn’t been an issue before,” he said. 

Lately during their legal clinics, it’s not just illegal immigrants who have come to ask questions. Sovern said they’ve seen a lot more people here legally who are asking if they’re safe, and family, friends and colleagues who want to protect their loved ones.

Sovern and the team at CILC want to expand, and be able to help more people. 

“We would like to be a public defender service for the whole state,” he said. “We have six lawyers now who spend weekends and nights trying to help people.”

The Community Immigration Law Center is holding a fundraiser with a matching grant from the Madison Community Foundation. The goal is to raise $100,000 in June. For more information, click here.