Many Americans learned how to recite the Pledge of Allegiance even before we learned how to read it. Recited hand over heart, it ends with a promise: liberty and justice for all. What most Americans don’t know is that for millions of people living within our borders, that promise is being tested every day in immigration courtrooms. And in those courtrooms, law students are often filling a gap that should not exist in a system committed to equal justice under the law.
What makes this crisis especially consequential is a fact embedded quietly in federal law: there is no right to a government-appointed attorney in immigration proceedings, even for people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. Even for children. The Sixth Amendment guarantees appointed counsel in criminal prosecutions, but immigration court is classified as a civil proceeding, despite stakes that can include prolonged detention or permanent removal from the country. You have the right to hire a lawyer. If you cannot find or afford one, you are left to navigate an incredibly complex and oftentimes contradictory legal system on your own.
Into this gap, law students have stepped—not symbolically, but practically. At schools like mine, the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, students in the immigration clinic serve as lead counsel in real cases under faculty supervision. We prepare motions, interview witnesses, and advocate on behalf of vulnerable individuals facing some of the most consequential legal proceedings of their lives.
This work is one of the great strengths of a clinical legal education. As student attorneys, we gain invaluable experience while expanding access to justice for those who might otherwise face deportation proceedings alone. The vast majority of the 197 law schools approved by the American Bar Association (ABA) have clinical programs dedicated to serving vulnerable communities, including those navigating the US immigration system. But law school clinics were never intended to serve as a substitute for a functioning system of legal representation.
The immigration court system is, by almost any measure, in crisis. Nearly 3.3 million cases are currently pending, and immigration judges carry average dockets of more than 2,000 cases—a backlog so severe that some hearings are now being scheduled for 2029. These are not abstract statistics. They represent mothers, fathers, and children waiting years in legal limbo, unable to plan for the future while their cases remain unresolved.
The structural problem extends well beyond the backlog. Immigration judges are employees of the Department of Justice rather than members of an independent judiciary. As a result, the system remains vulnerable to shifting political priorities and inconsistent application of the law across presidential administrations. Outcomes can depend less on the merits of a case and more on luck, geography, timing, and the political climate. That is not how justice should function.
Immigration is one of the rare issues that unites Americans in frustration while dividing them on solutions. So how do we fix a broken system without the political warfare that has paralyzed Congress for decades?
The answer may start with the courts. In 2022, the Real Courts, Rule of Law Act would have removed immigration courts from executive branch control, and for good reason. Today, an immigration judge is hired and can be removed by the attorney general—a presidential appointee—making the entire system vulnerable to political whims. Congress can change that by establishing Article I immigration courts, modeled after the US Tax Court and the military appeals courts—tribunals Congress creates by statute rather than under the judicial article of the Constitution. Their judges serve fixed terms and can be removed only for cause, not because the political winds shifted.
But court restructuring alone isn’t enough. Research conducted by Arnold & Porter alongside the ABA found that individuals with legal representation receive more favorable outcomes and faster decisions. Regardless of how immigration courts are structured, access to counsel remains essential to ensuring that justice is not reserved only for those who can afford it.
This debate is too often framed as tough versus lenient. It’s neither. It’s about building a system where the law is applied fairly, consistently, and equally to everyone who stands before it.
Until Congress addresses these structural problems, law students and clinics across the country will continue serving the vulnerable with skill, commitment, and care. As we should.
But access to justice should not depend on whether a law school clinic happens to be available.
We pledged liberty and justice for all, and the word “all” is not a suggestion.
Kayla Mozier is a third-year law student at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law (UDC Law). She serves as a Certified Student Attorney and as a judicial intern with the Montgomery County Circuit Court.
