This action was submitted through the GFMD Mayors Mechanism Call to Local Action for Migrants and Refugees.
Many individuals applying for immigration benefits seek legal assistance to navigate the arcane and confusing US legal system. However, the demand for accessible, affordable, and competent immigration legal assistance vastly outweighs supply. Legal aid organizations (LAOs) that help immigrants seek needed relief are vastly over capacity. The Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement has committed to funding community-based organizations (CBOs) to respond to this lack of capacity.
Our strategy provides grant funding to immigrant-led and immigrant-serving organizations to hire culturally competent attorneys, hire paralegals/case coordinators, and pay for the Department of Justice (DOJ) accreditation training process for the paralegals/case coordinators and other staff members. This approach allows immigrants to utilize the services of known and trusted CBOs that provide culturally competent and language-accessible immigration legal services. Moreover, the DOJ accreditation allows these organizations to provide immigration legal services in-house, therefore relieving some pressure from the LAOs. To date, funding under the pilot phase has provided support to three CBOs to provide services to their own community based on linguistic needs predominant in the City of Boston - one Haitian Creole-serving, one Brazilian Portuguese-serving, and one Spanish-serving.