Federal court declines to reverse termination of immigrant child legal rep grants
For the past four years the federal government has funded the Counsel for Children Initiative (CCI), which provided grants to organizations in order to provide full legal representation for children going through immigration proceedings. Federal grants also funded the Legal Orientation Program (LOP), which teaches those in immigration custody about the way the proceedings work and their rights. The Trump Administration abruptly terminated the LOP and CCI program grants, indicating that LOP would now be handled in-house while the CCI program was being discontinued entirely. In Amica Center for Immigrant Rights v. U.S. Department of Justice, a case challenging the grant terminations, a D.C. federal court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over the Administrative Procedure Act claims (holding that only the Court of Federal Claims could hear them) and rejected the First Amendment and other claims on the grounds that the government was not required to continue the CCI program (and the decision not to spend funds does not raise free speech concerns) nor outsource the LOP program.
