To combat aggressive ICE enforcement, Cardozo School of Law launches new immigration training for lawyers

With ICE’s using more aggressive enforcement, the Cardozo School of Law has announced the launch of a new program designed to train lawyers to adapt to the new tactics.

The law school recently created the Center for Immigration Innovation to provide training to help working immigration attorneys respond to the immigration enforcement that fall outside the immigration proceedings they are used to.

“Increasingly we’re seeing ICE arresting people when they show up at [immigration] courts, asking to terminate those proceedings and attempting to use extra-judicial mechanisms to force people out of the country in contravention of law,” said Peter Markowitz, co-director of the new center and Cardozo’s Immigration Justice Clinic.

The center will house the National Immigration Habeas Institute, which was formed in partnership with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance (NILA) to provide the training in these types of cases.

“Both the development of the center and NIHI enable us to offer more robust services, and help to catalyze innovative, community-centric solutions,” said co-director Lindsay Nash.

In recent years, New York City and state have expanded legal defense programs to represent immigrants facing deportation. Many immigration lawyers are used to practicing in administrative immigration courts, however, changes to immigration enforcement policies mean that immigration lawyers increasingly have to rely on habeas corpus rights, the law that protects people from being held in detention without a good reason.

“Increasingly, federal immigration authorities are doing everything they can to circumvent the immigration courts, to find mechanisms to detain people and to deport people without any oversight of those courts…” said Peter Markowitz, the center’s co-founder. “More and more, the only way to protect your client from unlawful detention and unlawful removal is through federal habeas actions.”

The law and procedures are vastly different in habeas proceedings than in immigration court, so working immigration attorneys need to be trained in this new area of the law to keep up, Markowitz said. “NIHI will be centered around an intensive training program where participants will learn how to litigate federal habeas petitions from some of the nation’s top litigators and scholars.”.

The first habeas training will take place at Cardozo October 16-17. The law school is providing the free intensive two day training in return for a commitment from attorneys to litigate at least one habeas petition referred by the institute in the year that follows and in collaboration with a mentor attorney.

Immigration attorneys can apply to take part in the training here . Completed applications are due by September 19.

The center anticipates training 75 to 100 attorneys annually and expects to take on an estimated 45 to 75 habeas petitions each year, which trainees will work on.

On October 10, the law school will also host an immigration enforcement workshop, which will bring leading scholars in the immigration arena r to share new research and responses to important issues impacting the field.

In the future it will invite legal scholars, advocates and people impacted by the immigration system to discuss timely topics impacting immigration law and policy.

Cardozo students will also have the opportunity to participate in student learning trips through the center, which will bring them to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Law students, like all people of conscience around the country, are horrified, at what they’re seeing, and the assault on immigrant communities and the assault on the rule of law…” Markowitz said. “We see that in upticks in enrollment in our immigration classes. We see that in upticks in applications to our clinic.”