“How to Stop Your Deportation”

This “How to Stop Deportation” guide released by Asian Law Caucus, Educators for Fair Consideration, DreamActivist.org and The New Immigrant Youth Alliance spread like wildfire yesterday to the point that I was accused of “vetting it” everywhere. I ended up having it emailed to me more than twice through South Asian networks, which pleases me quite a bit.

It’s the most complete guide on battling a deportation through advocacy that I’ve personally seen, but I’m probably also biased in my assessment. I think the crux of the guide is to exhaust all legal remedies before going public with your case, which makes a lot of sense. However, I think there’s a lot that could have been added to the legal section with regards to how removal proceedings work and more specific delaying tactics to employ beyond just a listing of legal avenues that one has during deportation. This is obviously not supposed to be an exhaustive guide and simply a starting point.

Another useful toolkit recently released by Duane Morris LLP, Maggio + Kattar and Penn State gives more information about private bills and deferred action.

I hope that together, both manuals can help demystify at least the post removal order part of deportation proceedings.

Update: The American Immigration Lawyers Association just announced “AILA Dream Defenders” unit on the heels of the guide but provided no further details. It looks like providing assistance to undocumented youth who qualify for the DREAM Act is quite popular and increasingly institutionalized.

I wish organizations with millions of dollars would rather focus their energy and interest in helping people who actually need pro-bono assistance. How about working with immigration courts to provide pro-bono assistance to a majority of people who may have criminal drug convictions but still don’t have any sort of legal representation?

Or is that just not popular and not backed with foundation money?