Immigrants and Refugees Need the Right to a Lawyer

This was not the first time in American history that lawyers have flocked to ports of entry to represent immigrants barred from entering the country for legally precarious reasons. In 1909, William Williams, the commissioner of immigration, who was charged with overseeing the implementation of federal immigration policy on Ellis Island, unilaterally announced that all aliens needed twenty-five dollars with them when they arrived.

 All others would be identified as “likely to become a public charge,” a poorly defined basis for inadmissibility typically interpreted as someone fated to be institutionalized in a jail or hospital. Lacking that amount, many people were denied entry and marked for return to their place of origin. Upon learning of Williams's order, lawyers from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), one of the first American organizations to institutionalize alien legal assistance, stepped in to help individuals in legal limbo.

Guiding excluded aliens through the appeals process, which first took place before a three-person panel known as the Board of Special Inquiry, HIAS lawyers advised aliens on how to answer the questions that would determine their fate; simple miswording could render someone permanently inadmissible. For many years the Bureau of Immigration banned lawyers from participating in actual Board proceedings, a rule that HIAS lawyers also protested. For those individuals whose hearings failed to secure admission, HIAS lawyers wrote appeals to Bureau of Immigration officials, who had the ultimate authority in immigration decisions during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Securing admission is complex and newcomers to the United States have little recourse without the aid of legal professionals. Access to a lawyer familiar with the U.S. immigration system often makes a difference in whether an alien can remain in the United States. Immigrants and refugees should not need to rely on the goodwill of individual judges or kindhearted lawyers to secure safe admission into this country. If we want to ensure their safe passage,we need to grant them the right to legal representation on point of every entry if stopped.