Maryland Carey Law’s new appellate immigration clinic takes shape

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With the backlog of immigration cases in U.S. immigration court recently exceeding 3 million, immigration practitioners and professors hope to expand access to legal services for noncitizens. One Maryland law school is aiming to close the legal representation gap.

The University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law’s federal appellate immigration clinic, now in its third semester, represents clients before the Board of Immigration Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals, often in deportation cases.

Aadhithi Padmanabhan, assistant professor at Maryland Carey Law and director of the federal immigration clinic, said one of the goals of the clinic is to expand access to appellate legal services for noncitizens going through the deportation process.

“A lot of nonprofit organizations that do removal defense work don’t have the capacity, funding or the expertise to take on serious appellate work, particularly when it comes to the judicial review stage,” Padmanabhan said. “This clinic is really meant to fill a gap in the existing legal infrastructure and to provide a type of service to noncitizens that is even less available than legal services at the immigration court level.”

The seven-credit clinic, which obtained funding from and is part of the school’s Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice, gives students the type of legal experience that Padmanabhan said she had as a litigator. Under the supervision of Padmanabhan, students in the clinic conduct legal research and write briefs, motions and memoranda, driven by court deadlines.

“One of the things I found particularly interesting about (the clinic) is the ability to kind of shape the law so it affects not just your client, but everyone that comes after your client,” said Rafael Moreno, a third-year student who has been involved with the clinic since its’ inception in the spring 2023 semester.

Moreno said the clinic encourages students to deeply engage with the issues when writing a brief, and requires a creative approach to legal research.

Jess Grover, a third-year student returning for a second semester with the clinic, said his clinic experience has been an opportunity for him to improve his writing and thinking.

“It’s already turned into real skills and experience and helped me, and vastly broadened my thinking about the immigration system and the administrative state,” Grover said. “I think it’s hard to overstate how deeply we engage with our issues and with the law in general.”

In the spring 2023 semester, students in the clinic filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on behalf of the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, arguing that the court should reconsider a “crime of moral turpitude” deportation ground. Moreno, who worked on the brief, said he may have the opportunity to represent the project on oral arguments before the 2nd Circuit, depending on court scheduling.

Maureen Sweeney, professor and co-director of the general practice immigration clinic since 2004, said one of Maryland Carey Law’s goals is to provide students with a holistic experience of what it means to be a client’s lawyer.

“One of the goals (of the immigration clinics) is to give students practical lawyering experience so that they understand that a legal case is not just about an opinion that’s written at the end, but it’s about a human being, and it’s about evidence, and it’s about skills of interviewing somebody and being able to establish trust with a client,” Sweeney said.

Beyond the immigration case backlog, Padmanabhan and Sweeney note how Congress and the current administration have shaped immigration law.

“There are policies that the current administration has in place for exercising law enforcement prosecutorial discretion,” Padmanabhan said. “I think those are a step in the right direction, but I think those policies could be pursued more aggressively and fewer cases need to even be brought to the immigration court system.”

Sweeney said the immigration system is “a creature of Congress.”

“There’s a fundamental problem that we have an immigration system that is hyper-focused on enforcement and is not calibrated to the current needs,” Sweeney said. “We have a Congress that is kind of paralyzed and not likely to take practical action on any of those problems.”

Sweeney said one possible solution to improve the immigration system would be for Congress to create an independent Article I immigration court, similar to how the tax court operates.

Padmanabhan said as the criminal legal system and immigration system become more enmeshed, practitioners, much like students in the appellate clinic, need to become familiar with both systems.

“It’s become important for immigration practitioners to develop an understanding and familiarity with the criminal system, and vice versa,” Padmanabhan said. “There’s a lot of interesting legal issues that lie at that intersection.”

In the meantime, “This clinic is doing its small part to remedy that and provide legal services, often to indigent clients,” Padmanabhan said.