Equal Justice Works Shares Ahilan Arulanantham’s Remarks from the 2024 Scales of Justice Event

On October 15, 2024, Equal Justice Works honored Ahilan Arulanantham, the Professor from Practice and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, with the Distinguished Alumni Award. Read his remarks from the event below.

I am deeply honored to receive this award from Equal Justice Works. What this organization has done to advance social justice by seeding generations of public interest lawyers has been remarkable. I benefited immensely from the training and opportunities the organization gave me—both directly, through its own programs at fellows’ conferences, and through the education I received from my host organization—the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where I had the chance to learn from some of the best litigators in the country.  

Watch a recording of Ahilan’s remarks here:

That time really launched my career as an immigrants’ rights lawyer. And I have loved every minute of it… though not, I must admit, because of the dramatic improvement that has happened in the field during my career. Quite the opposite in fact.  

Like a slow-motion train wreck, over the last 25 years I have seen the Overton window gradually but consistently move in an anti-immigrant direction, and always farther away from evidence-based, rational decision making. Until today, where the story of Ms. Sassy the Cat—allegedly eaten by Haitian refugees, but subsequently discovered alive and well in the basement of her house in Springfield, Ohio—has gotten more attention than virtually all of the thousands of people who have come here just trying to make a better life for themselves and their families.  

Now, to be fair, what Ms. Sassy did is pretty remarkable. According to the Wall Street Journal, which faithfully recounted her story, she is a Maine Coon. Do people here know what that is? It’s a HUGE cat. Like, basically a small mountain lion! How exactly did Ms. Sassy manage to hide in a basement for three days? Inquiring minds want to know! But seriously… it’s been too much. 

As Carmen referenced, I have spent much of my career litigating cases to establish a right to appointed counsel for people facing deportation. Back when I started, naïve me thought this should be a relatively easy point on which decision makers could agree. Whatever you think the rules governing deportation should be, surely we can all agree they should be administered fairly. And you cannot have a fair deportation hearing with a prosecutor on one side arguing for deportation, but no one to defend the immigrant on the other. I learned that on my grade school playground—you have to have a level playing field.   

We started working intensively toward that goal about 15 years ago, through a class action lawsuit called Franco Gonzales v Holder, which focused on the rights of people with serious mental disorders. Mr. Franco had a very serious cognitive impairment. The government had sought to deport him for a crime he committed, but refused to provide him with a lawyer. The immigration judge could tell he didn’t understand what was happening, so she closed his case until a lawyer could be found, but didn’t order his release.  

So he spent the next four and a half years imprisoned by immigration authorities with no active proceedings against him.  

Mr. Franco became the lead plaintiff in a large class action we filed. And we won. Franco established a right to free legal representation for people with serious mental disorders facing deportation. The 2013 injunction remains in place to this day. And Mr. Franco is a US citizen. 

I savored that victory, but I always saw it as a first step. A giant one, bitterly fought, but still just a step. 

Yet today, more than a decade later, the program established through the Franco injunction—the National Qualified Representative program—remains the only mechanism for appointment of counsel in the federal immigration system. For all other immigrants facing deportation, they can get legal representation if they can pay for it, if a pro bono organization has capacity to help them, or if a state or local entity funds counsel (as several now do), but otherwise they are on their own.  

And most of them are. According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in August 2024, 85% of all immigrants ordered removed did not have a lawyer. That number includes long-time lawful residents convicted of minor crimes, people fleeing persecution from countries with raging civil wars, and many people jailed in the immigration detention system—who have to fight their cases pro se from behind bars.    

But worst of all, that number also includes children. Even now, after years working on this issue, the claim seems absurd even as I say it. Can you believe that we live in a country where federal immigration prosecutors appear in court against unrepresented children, and Immigration Judges order those children deported? But it’s true. It still happens—in thousands and thousands of cases. In a detailed study we conducted at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School, where I now work, we found that nearly one third of all immigration court cases initiated by the Biden Administration—more than 80,000 during a five month period we analyzed—were against children. 30,000 of those children were under the age of five. Many were part of family units, but many others were unaccompanied—they came here alone.  

Most unrepresented unaccompanied children never even make it to court. In our data set, 86% of the removal orders issued against unaccompanied children were for failing to appear. Think about that for a minute: under the immigration laws, unrepresented children can be ordered deported because they did not bring themselves to court. I scarcely trust my 8-year-old daughter to walk across the street. How can we possibly impose life-altering legal consequences on children for failing to make it to court? But we do. Just in 2022 and 2023 alone, more than 13,000 unaccompanied children were ordered removed for failing to come to court.  

After we won Franco, I worked with an extraordinary team of attorneys to try to change that. We spent five years litigating multiple cases—including a very large class action—seeking to establish a right to appointed counsel for children. (EJW made a substantial investment in that work—by my count at least three fellows spent large portions of their fellowships working on those cases).  

Some of you may even remember the deposition testimony we got in one of them, when the Assistant Chief Immigration Judge for Vulnerable Populations told me in a deposition that he had taught immigration law to three- and four-year olds. “It takes time, and patience” he said, “but it can be done.”  

To state the obvious, that is incorrect. His statements were mocked in videos that went viral, and even attacked in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. We used it to raise awareness on this issue, create more pressure for government and pro bono funding for counsel. And probably, indirectly, our efforts did help to protect many children from deportation.   

But what that Judge said effectively remains the position of our government to this day. All that litigation we did never resulted in a ruling on the merits. And the thousands of children who have come here since we filed the first cases on this in 2014 remain vulnerable to deportation—easy targets in any future federal mass deportation campaign, but also targets right now for smaller enforcement operations, and for employers looking to exploit vulnerable immigrant workers.   

I chose to focus my remarks on this issue today for two reasons. First, I wanted everyone listening here to know that the other attorneys who have worked on this and related issues involving immigrant children have not given up. We have continued to push at all levels of government (federal and state, legislative, executive, and administrative) for a right to counsel, and ultimately for a world in which every proceeding involving an immigrant child is focused on the best interests of the child, which is how it works for children in virtually every other legal context, in this country and around the world. 

Second—and this is particularly for any younger public interest attorneys in the room—I want you to know that I have found tremendous joy in this struggle. My partners in it have become some of my closest friends. The fact that we have not won—not yet won—has made us re-think our strategies from time to time. But it has not weakened our resolve. 

Mahatma Gandhi spent decades peacefully advocating – and eventually winning – one of the greatest struggles for freedom in the history of the world. He once said “it’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there will be any fruit. But that does not mean you stop doing what is right. You may never know what results come from your action. But you know if you do nothing, there will be no result.”  

So I exhort you all, in the spirit of Equal Justice Works: to continue to do the right thing. Ultimately, that is where our greatest strength will always lie. Thank you very much. 

Click here for more information about the Scales of Justice. Click here to learn more about Ahilan.