Up to 16 law students can work in the clinic per semester.
ATLANTA – A new, one-of-a-kind immigration clinic is set to open in Georgia next year.
Program director Emily Torstveit said one of the goals is to help immigrants with their deportation.
“There are currently more than 31,000 cases in arrears with the immigration courts,” said Torstveit. “If we increase the number of lawyers doing the job, it will increase efficiency and make it run smoothly for everyone involved.”
Up to 16 law students can work in the clinic per semester. The clinic is funded by a two-year scholarship of $ 300,000.
The program accepts customers from January.
Georgia has become an integral part of the immigration debate. The state was viewed as the location for a permanent children’s prison at one point. However, these plans failed.
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In Gwinnett County, the sheriff received heat after renewing the controversial 287 (g) program, which allows specially trained officials to verify the immigration status of individuals once they are brought to prison on criminal charges.
And after nearly 700 people were detained in a poultry factory in Mississippi in one of the biggest immigration raids in a decade, some wondered if Georgia’s own poultry industry – one of the largest in the world that relies heavily on migrant workers – could see the same thing.
In Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms issued an executive order in 2018 that ended the city’s relationship with the ICE. She told federal agencies that she would no longer place inmates in the Atlanta City Jail. ICE is now home to detainees at other detention centers in Clayton Stewart and Irwin Counties and Folkston, Georgia.
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And that year, Bottoms publicly said she would not be actively involved in large-scale planned ICE heists because her administration did not want to be “complicit” in separating children from their parents, a tactic the Trump administration is actively considering Funds are used to dissuade illegal immigration.
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