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When a person is held in immigration detention and facing deportation from the U.S., they are given two options: pay for an attorney, or appear in court alone. Because deportation proceedings are civil procedures, there's currently no right to a public defender.
They're simply given a list of nonprofit organizations that provide free or low-cost legal services. Yet most nonprofits cannot handle the influx of requests.
The other option is to hire a private attorney, which can be upward of $10,000 and is often cost-prohibitive. As a result, more than 70% of people in immigration detention in fiscal year 2023 represented themselves, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center at Syracuse University.
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