The Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown has seen more than 5,000 people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New Jersey since the president returned to power in January. The number of detainees at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark alone has tripled over the last three months, up to more than 800 people as of November.
The rising number of detainees means a soaring demand for the services of immigration attorneys, and those attorneys are struggling to keep up. Alexandra Gonçalves Peña, the legal director of the New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program for the American Friends Service Committee, described the situation in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.
“The reality is that the demand is quickly outpacing — as it always has outpaced — the ability for us to actually provide services for a large group of people,” Gonçalves Peña said.
Attorneys straining to keep up with demand are also faced with the challenges of a shifting legal landscape. Gonçalves Peña said that policy changes implemented under the Trump administration have made in more difficult for detainees to be released.
“Thousands more people are now subject to mandatory detention,” Gonçalves Peña said. “As a result of that, it is becoming increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to get noncitizens actually out of detention.”
Gonçalves Peña added that the expansion of mandatory detention has forced attorneys to go to the federal court system and petition for their client’s release through a writ of habeus corpus. That process takes more of the attorney’s time and resources, limiting their ability to take on additional clients. Gonçalves Peña called the situation “absolutely heartbreaking.”
“Immigration law has always been incredibly difficult, incredibly nuanced. You have to have a certain level of skill to succeed in these cases,” Gonçalves Peña said. “Unfortunately, now, with all of these policy changes, it’s making the work more difficult.”
