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 The lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups
in federal court in Seattle seeks to force the federal government to
provide attorneys for undocumented children facing deportation in
immigration hearings.
If successful, the move would change longstanding policy on the
treatment of children in immigration courts.
"Their only hope of having a fair proceeding is if they have a legal
representative," Matt Adams, an attorney for the children, said at
hearing before Judge Thomas S. Zilly. "There is no justification for
making immigration law the exception to the norm."
The case made headlines after a federal immigration judge said in a
deposition that he has been able to explain the nuances of U.S.
immigration law to children as young as three- and four-years-old,
provoking outrage from activists.
Immigration policy became a hotly debated issue in the U.S.
presidential campaign after Republican frontrunner Donald Trump
accused Mexico of sending criminals to the U.S. and vowed to build a
wall to keep people from crossing the border illegally.
 A surge of unaccompanied children crossed the U.S. border in the
latter half of 2014, mostly fleeing gang violence and economic
hardships in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
That wave subsided, but the flow of immigrant children increased
again toward the end of last year, with 12,505 taken into custody
between Oct. 1 and Nov. 20 of 2015.
On Thursday, Zilly heard arguments on several motions in the case,
including whether to dismiss several of the plaintiffs and whether
to allow it to proceed as a class action suit.
Among the children seeking legal representation via the case are an
11-year-old in Washington state whose mother abandoned him, a
4-year-old from El Salvador who lives in Los Angeles, and others in
Texas and Florida, said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Ahilan
Arulanantham, who is representing the children.
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The complaint, filed in 2014, says that sending indigent children
into a civil immigration hearing against an adversarial prosecutor
violates constitutional guarantees of due process as well as federal
laws requiring a "full and fair hearing" before a immigration judge.
Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leon Fresco, who is
representing the federal government, argued Thursday that the
children are protected by existing policies and pro-bono legal
services, and that offering foreigners the automatic right to an
attorney would wreck the immigration system.
"Once you recognize that people who have not had any ties or
interest in the U.S. can come in and sue, you will have an
unadminsterable immigration system," he said.
Fresco said class-action status would betray the varying "individual
interests" at stake for each child, and that 72 percent of cases in
which children do not have attorneys end without removal from the
U.S.
Zilly did not indicate when he would rule on the motions, which both
sides say could affect thousands of children.
(Story correctes to remove reference to U.S. citizens in paragraph
3).
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Sharon
Bernstein and Simon Cameron-Moore)
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