Immigration and Justice
Vera's Center on Immigration and Justice (CIJ) works with government, nonprofit partners, and communities to improve government systems that affect immigrants’ lives. CIJ focuses on two objectives: increasing immigrants’ access to legal services, and improving relationships between immigrant communities and law enforcement. The center administers legal services programs, develops and implements pilot programs, provides technical assistance, and conducts evaluation and empirical research.
Related Work
Compassion, Not Confinement
How States and Localities Can Help Ensure Humane Housing for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Awaiting Family Reunification
In the first five months of 2021, about 65,000 children were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after arriving in the United States unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian. These children come to the United States seeking protection, stability, and a chance to reunite with their families, but are instead processed at federa ...
End the Cycle of Crises for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children
For the past decade, conditions in northern Central America have propelled the migration of vulnerable and often traumatized children to the U.S. border. Many of them arrive seeking refuge as they flee targeted violence, pervasive corruption, and natural disasters. The U.S. government’s failure to build a system for their adequate care and swiftly ...
Blog Post
Shaina Aber
Megan Mack
Eight Ways to Ease the Child Detention Crisis
Immigration Brief
More than a decade after the conditions in northern Central America led to increasing numbers of families and children arriving in the United States without their parents, the federal government has failed to build a humane system to ensure their welfare and safety. As a result, children as young as six are being detained in overcrowded U.S. Border ...
Implementing the Vision at the Local and State Level Summary
Advancing Universal Representation: A Toolkit for Advocates, Organizers, Legal Service Providers, and Policymakers
Universal representation—a public defender system for all immigrants facing deportation—is based on the fundamental belief that everyone deserves due process under the law. While a growing movement works toward a legally mandated and federally funded representation system, several counties, cities, and states have stepped up to fund deportation def ...
One Year Later, We Still Don’t Know How Many People in ICE Detention Have Been Exposed to COVID-19
Despite Vera’s efforts to track what ICE reports on COVID-19 in detention, the agency’s limited reporting remains insufficient for understanding the scope of this crisis and its implications for the treatment of people subject to detention in the future. Critical information—such as the total number of people at risk within facilities, who have bee ...
Blog Post
Noelle Smart
Adam Garcia
Even after I Won My Case, ICE Wouldn’t Let Me Go until My Lawyer Intervened
A Federal Defender Service for Immigrants
Why We Need a Universal, Zealous, and Person-Centered Model
The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) recommends that the Biden administration draw from time-tested models, data, and knowledge to build a federally funded, universal legal defense service that provides universal, zealous, and person-centered defense to all immigrants. This federal defender service should be modeled on the criminal federal defender ...
Building the Movement Summary
Advancing Universal Representation: A Toolkit for Advocates, Organizers, Legal Service Providers, and Policymakers
The movement for universal representation—the idea that every immigrant facing detention and deportation should have the right to a publicly funded lawyer if they cannot afford one—continues to gain significant momentum. As a result of local and state campaigns, more than 40 jurisdictions across the country now fund deportation defense programs. Wi ...
Rising to the Moment: Advancing the National Movement for Universal Representation
Years 1-3 of the SAFE Initiative
In 2017, the Vera Institute of Justice launched the Safety and Fairness for Everyone Network—now known as the SAFE Initiative or “SAFE”—to counter the fundamental and urgent injustices facing immigrants caught up in the nation’s immigration enforcement system. With roots in Vera's work for the past 15 years building the government-funded removal de ...
Tracking COVID-19 in Immigration Detention
A Dashboard of ICE Data
Series: Target 2020
The Tipping Point for Universal Representation for Immigrants
In early October, ICE reported that, within a six-day span, it arrested 172 immigrants across six “sanctuary cities”: Baltimore, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, DC. These cities all have policies in place that are intended to foster trust between local law enforcement and immigrants in their jurisdictions, and yet parents, ...
Blog Post
Melissa Garlick
Annie Chen
Evidence Shows That Most Immigrants Appear for Immigration Court Hearings
The United States confines hundreds of thousands of immigrants in prison-like detention facilities at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars each year. Expanding use of civil detention is often justified by the government as being necessary to ensure that immigrants continue to attend court proceedings. This fact sheet reviews evidence from the ...