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Deportees do not have Constitutional right to a Lawyer

By Annie Banerjee

The Bush Government has been trying to erode all constitutional rights for eight long years. In a final blow, Attorney General Mukasey, overruled long standing precedence and ruled that Aliens do not have a right to a lawyer. I can perfectly understand that the Government does not want to pay for counsel for people in deportation proceedings. But they do not have the right to reopen a case with a new attorney if his previous attorney screwed up.
Matter of Enrique Salas COMPEAN, 24 I&N Dec. 710 (A.G. 2009)
Defendants in deportation proceedings do not have the right for effective assistance of Counsel. This is outrageous. There are so many cases in which lawyers miss deadlines or does not assist effectively in procedural or substantive matters. Almost all of these defendants do not understand our legal process, and most don't even understand English. Add to it the fact that in the last two years, a lot of immigration judges were political appointees, who have no experience in Immigration, and may have hidden agendas. You can potentially have a KKK member, sitting as a judge somewhere, who would be perfectly happy to send a political asylum seeker back to his home country to be killed.

Contact Houston Immigration Lawyer, Annie Banerjee for more details

Full post as published by US Immigration Matters on January 08, 2009 (boomark / email).