Court may aid young immigrants

Illegal immigrants in the most dire straits may receive more help in staying in the U.S

An immigration court set to open in Charlotte this spring could help hundreds of illegal immigrant children each year win the right to remain in North Carolina.

The court, much closer than the current venue in Atlanta, will provide youngsters in North Carolina better access to immigration lawyers. As a result, scores of children who arrive here without their families, often fleeing gang violence or sexual abuse, may no longer face deportation simply because they can't find a North Carolina lawyer willing to take up their cause in Atlanta.

Advocates say many children end up being shipped back to countries where they face dangerous conditions even though many have legitimate claims to stay in the United States.

"We're hoping we can save some lives," said Tricia Swartz, head of the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, a Washington-based group that provides social services to unaccompanied immigrant children. "Some of these children have been stalked by gangs; their parents have been killed. If they're deported, when they get off the plane, they might be murdered."

North Carolina has become one of the nation's biggest magnets for unaccompanied immigrant children, most from Mexico and Central America, Swartz said. Each year, about 200 unaccompanied children who are picked up by immigration officials are placed with relatives or guardians in North Carolina and given orders to appear later in immigration court.

Swartz said North Carolina now takes in about as many children as places such as Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Texas. But unlike those areas, North Carolina has few resources, including lawyers experienced in immigration law, to help them.

Many immigrant children can remain in the United States under laws that provide shelter to parentless children, crime victims and those targeted for political or religious persecution -- but without lawyers, they have little chance of proving their right to stay.

The government does not provide them lawyers because their violations are civil, not criminal. That leaves them in need of volunteer lawyers, because the children almost invariably cannot afford to pay.

All immigration cases are handled in a special federal court; the Atlanta court now serves North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. North Carolina lawmakers fought for the Charlotte court to serve the Carolinas, saying it was needed to ease a backlog of deportations.

But Sarah Buffett, a Charlotte lawyer who tries to find volunteer lawyers for immigrant children, said she hopes the new court will inspire more North Carolina lawyers to learn immigration law and take up the cases of neglected children. Now, she says she finds few lawyers willing to travel to Atlanta for clients who can't pay.

"They're going to court by themselves, and some of them are 11 and speak no English," Buffett said.

Stand firm, some say

Those who want a crackdown on illegal immigration say most of those children should be sent home.

Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which advocates tougher immigration laws, said that asylum should be allowed only in extreme cases and that making exceptions for children encourages lawless immigration. And, Krikorian said, many children falsely claim that their parents are dead or their lives are threatened.

Krikorian acknowledged that many foreign children come from terrible circumstances, but he said that doesn't justify their sneaking into the country.

"Coming to the United States is not the solution for backwardness around the world," he said.