The Right to Counsel of Immigration Clients – Advancement or Retreat in a Post-Covid World?
The Covid-19 pandemic, due to public health and safety concerns, triggered restrictions on mobility, both international and intranational, and on business and social gatherings. Accordingly and concurrently, many bureaucratic and judicial governmental functions were delayed and/or compelled to be conducted online. Eighteen months after the start of the pandemic, an inflection point may have been reached. Specifically, while such governmental measures often were implemented on an emergency basis, it is appropriate now to scrutinize which such measures should be made permanent, and which such measures should be eliminated, in order to protect and enhance the right to counsel in immigration proceedings.
In this context, the objective of our session will be to (1) analyze the impact of such travel restrictions on the ability of immigration lawyers to adequately represent clients, including discussing whether these restrictions been co-opted to promote anti-immigration political agendas, and (2) formulate solutions such that new and emerging technologies can be employed to augment the immigration client’s access to, and quality of, counsel.