Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public–and Happy New Year! It’s been awhile, so there’s plenty of news to bring you all up-to-speed with. I’ll jump right into it, beginning with a new blog post aggregating various responses to the featured piece from the December 21 digest (a critique of law school’s role in our democracy by Prof. Moyn of Yale Law).

Best wishes for 2019!
Sam

Immigration, Asylum, and Citizenship

• Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced that “asylum-seekers presenting themselves at the southern border will be returned to Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings, a process that often takes several years.”
• CNN reported on how the federal government shutdown is interfering with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The Washington Post ran a similar story.
• In Shelby County, TN, the County Attorney announced publicly his conclusion that a new state law requiring local authorities to obey federal requests to hold immigrants until federal agents can arrive does not apply to the county.
• In Minnesota, incoming Attorney General Keith Ellison named Josh Keller, Executive Director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, as his Chief Deputy Attorney General.
• The San Diego Tribune reported that “with as few as eight remaining eligible children moving toward possible reunification, the focus of [the family reunification effort] has shifted to restoring the rights of the migrants and to preventing such a crisis from happening again.”
• In San Francisco, CA, local public radio profiled the city’s Immigration Defense Unit, established last year to represent people threatened with deportation.
• In New York, Governor Cuomo announced his administration will “expand[] its first-in-the-nation legal defense project for immigrants to include social and health care services for families and rapid response to raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
  • Also in New York, the State Office for New Americans hired 20 full-time immigration attorneys to offer free legal services to immigrants.
• In Portland, ME, CentralMaine.com reported that as “the city and state are among the few that offer shelter and financial assistance to [] immigrants while their asylum cases are being processed…the arrival of so many asylum seekers has overwhelmed local services, including the city’s emergency shelter for homeless families.”

Government Hiring

• The Hill reported that new congressional representatives are facing difficulties setting up their offices–and hiring staff–while taking office during the federal government shutdown.
• Meanwhile, Newsweek reported that “Democrats are on a hiring spree for lawyers to help investigate Donald Trump in 2019.”
• In British Columbia, the Province Attorney General invited all law students in the province to visit his office.

Student Debt

• Forbes.com picked up the story that 99.5% of applicants to-date have been rejected by the student loan forgiveness program, amplifying the issue (already mentioned in previous editions of this digest). (Forbes also predicted that “the future of student loan forgiveness may change [in 2019].”) USA Today ran a similar story.
• Senators Doug Jones, Catherine Cortez-Masto, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren “submitted a letter to more than 100 stakeholders around the nation requesting feedback that can advance policies for student borrowers of color and work to make higher education more equitable.”
• In an opinion column, the Washington Examiner reported on research suggesting that “58 percent of independents and 47 percent of Republicans ‘strongly agree’ that student loan debt levels are at ‘crisis’ magnitudes,” urging Republican lawmakers to allow “[a]n employee signing up for a new 401(k) plan at work [to direct] his employer match…to his student loan until it’s paid off.” This idea is similar to–yet differences in crucial ways from–legislation recently proposed by Senator Wyden (mentioned in a prior edition of this digest), which would allow employers to make matching contributions to employee retirement accounts as employees paid off their student debt.
• Inequality.org profiled the “grassroots organizations [] pushing for sweeping change [concerning student debt] on a national level.”

Legal Technology

• Congress passed the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, which technology groups say will “ensure that the federal government releases valuable data sets, follows best practices in data management and commits to making data available to the public in a non-proprietary and electronic format.”
• Industry commentators predicted that “it’s likely that a Democratic-led House will reinvigorate a push for a federal data privacy regime. But it’s unlikely that such a big piece of legislation will have an easy path through Congress.”
• In Pennsylvania, legal groups launched mycleanslatepa.com — a website that aims “to help people figure out if they are entitled to get their criminal records sealed under [a] new law [that took effect in late December].”
• According to an online survey by the Harris Poll, “[j]ust over two-thirds of Americans…state they would definitely use online legal services to save money.”

Access to Justice – Civil

• The American Board of Trial Advocates adopted a resolution supporting the work of the Legal Services Corporation.
• In Newark, NJ, the City Counsel approved a right-to-counsel law to ensure low-income tenants facing evictions have free legal representation, making Newark the latest city to join the right-to-counsel-for-evictions movement (mentioned in prior editions of this digest).
• In Minneapolis, MN, the Volunteer Lawyers Network published a study tracking more than 300 eviction cases finding that 96% of “fully represented” tenants won or settled their cases, while only 6% of tenants without lawyers left housing court with a clear eviction record.
• In Ontario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin published a video feature discussing a recent report from the Province’s auditor general “rais[ing] several concerns about how a half-billion dollars in legal aid funding is deployed in [the] province.”
• In Iowa, the Vice Chair of the Iowa Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission gave an interview to the Des Moines Register in which she discussed

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Utah, Governor Herbert proposed expanding the state’s public defender system budget more than fourfold— move the San Francisco Chronicle observes “comes after the state was sharply criticized in a 2015 report by the Sixth Amendment Center [as] one of just two states that left public-defender funding entirely up to local governments.”
• In Oakland County, MI, “[c]ounty officials have taken the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission to court, arguing that the county needs more money to hire additional staff [and] seeking a court order that says they don’t have to comply with the state regulations until the county receives a grant to cover the cost.” (The work of the Indigent Defense Commission to reform Michigan’s indigent defense system has been mentioned extensively in previous editions of this digest.)
  • Meanwhile, in Livingston County, MI, the Indigent Defense Commission’s new standards translated into a 25% pay raise for six of seven public defenders.
• In Faulkner County, AR, Arkansas Online reported that “the Faulkner County Quorum Court has diverted more than $350,000 in restricted funds from the 20th Judicial Circuit public defender’s office to other programs. The prosecuting attorney’s office, which got part of the money, has agreed to return $23,500, but the Quorum Court has declined to reimburse any of the remaining money. That refusal leaves the public defender’s office without enough money to hire an investigator or a legal secretary to assist part-time defenders[.]”
• In Louisiana, State Public Defender Jay Dixon “told legislators some of the state’s public defender districts are at risk of becoming insolvent in a year or two if the state doesn’t provide more funding.”
• In St. Louis County, MO, the Eastern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals referred a case to the State Supreme Court that challenges structural reforms to the state’s public defender system, including a maximum caseload for individual defenders and a directive to focus attorney resources on defendants languishing in jail.
• In Washington County, NY, the County Public Defender reported that based on end-of-year statistics his office would be in compliance with new caseload standards imposed as part of a court settlement devised in 2014 which came into effect in the last six months of 2018.

Criminal Justice Reform

• The Associated Press reported about how “at least eight new reform-minded prosecutors will take office in cities around the country after winning their local elections by promising to be more compassionate toward drug addicts and more evenhanded in the treatment of minorities.”
• In St. Louis, MO, incoming District Attorney Wesley Bell announced his office “will no longer prosecute marijuana possession cases, among other changes…Bell wants to change the cash bail system, opposes the death penalty and pledged to hold police officers accountable if they step out of line.” The new district attorney has also fired some staff and suspended others pending termination hearings.
• In Dallas, TX, incoming District Attorney John Creuzot told reporters that his office may not prosecute “first-time marijuana offenders and simple criminal trespass [cases], ” asking his office to “join with me in another era of criminal justice reform.”
• In Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun Counties, VA, “liberal challengers are taking on prosecutors whose views they see as retrograde and excessively punitive.”
• In the Yukon, the Yukon Legal Services Society applauded the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision that “imposing mandatory victim fine surcharges on offenders is unconstitutional.”
• In Baltimore, MD, the public defender’s office called for an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department’s alleged “widespread practice of wrongly expunging internal affairs files of officers accused of misconduct.”