The Board met during September 2022 to discuss grant applications. As a result of that discussion, the Board made the following grants to five worthy organizations.
Click on each Grantee’s name below to read more about their organization and the case for which they received funding.
The Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) was founded 20 years ago to combat an emerging human rights crisis: the targeting of immigrants for mass imprisonment and deportation. As this crisis has continued to escalate, IDP has remained steadfast in fighting for fairness and justice for all immigrants caught at the intersection of the racially biased U.S. criminal and immigration systems. IDP fights to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multi-pronged strategy including advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.
THE CASE: In P-V- v. Garland, No. 21-6380 (2d Cir.), and A-J- v. Garland, No. 21-631 (9th Cir.), IDP will challenge federal administrative precedents that discriminate against noncitizens by excluding them from the full benefits of criminal justice reform.
Through a series of administrative opinions issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals and Office of the Attorney General starting in 1999, the federal government has exceeded its statutory authority by declining to recognize criminal justice reform and post-conviction relief laws in federal immigration proceedings. As reflected through the government’s own publicly released data, these decisions are applied almost exclusively against noncitizens who are people of color. The Trump Administration accelerated these ill effects by adding new decisions and standards that discriminate against noncitizens whose convictions and sentences have been eliminated or modified by state criminal procedure laws. Before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Ninth Circuits, IDP is standing up to challenge these acts of discrimination that contribute to mass deportations, family separation, and abuse of the criminal legal and immigration systems against communities of color. In P-V- v. Garland, IDP is before the Second Circuit challenging the BIA’s refusal to give full effect to the One Day to Protect New Yorkers Act, a groundbreaking misdemeanor sentencing reform law. The BIA has relied on a precedent issued under former AG Sessions’s leadership to order the deportation of a green card holder from New York who was resentenced under the law. In A-J- v. Garland, IDP is before the Ninth Circuit challenging a rule begun in 1999 and exacerbated by former AG Barr that creates an often unachievable standard for when a vacated, expunged, or otherwise eliminated conviction may still be regarded as a conviction under immigration law. By participating in coordinated litigation teams and marshaling principles of administrative, constitutional, and anti-discrimination law, IDP will fight the destructive impacts of race and national origin bias in the criminal and immigration systems in the United States
Grant contact: Lee Wang, Deputy Director – Strategic Initiatives, Immigrant Defense Project, P.O. Box 1765, New York, NY 10027, 646-760-0589, lee@immdefense.org
Founded in 1972, the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law works for a society where individuals with mental disabilities live with autonomy, dignity, and opportunity in welcoming communities that help them reach their full potential. For 50 years, we have been a leader among disability advocates in securing legal rights and systems changes that have improved the lives of people with mental disabilities. We were instrumental in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) and played a key role in securing the Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) that the needless institutionalization of people with disabilities is a form of discrimination prohibited by the ADA.
THE CASE: M.J. v. District of Columbia. In 2018, the Bazelon Center, along with co-counsel Disability Rights DC at University Legal Services, the National Center for Youth Law, and the law firm Schulte, Roth & Zabel, filed a class action on behalf of hundreds of District of Columbia children who are unnecessarily institutionalized or at serious risk of unnecessary institutionalization. The complaint alleges widespread failures by DC’s children’s mental health system to provide federally required intensive community-based services for children in their own homes, schools, and elsewhere in the community. As a result, the District’s children suffer drastically curtailed life opportunities, cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric residential treatment facilities that are often hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families, other residential treatment centers, juvenile detention facilities, and group homes. The complaint alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Medicaid Act. The ADA requires the District to serve its children with disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate. For virtually all children, this setting is their own home or another family or foster home. The Medicaid Act requires the District to provide intensive community-based services to all children with mental health disabilities who need them, to help them live in their own homes and communities, and participate fully in family and community life.
The proposed case seeks to reform the behavioral health system for Medicaid-eligible children and youth in the District. The case clarifies states’ obligations under the Medicaid Act, the ADA, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which apply to all state Medicaid programs and/or recipients of federal financial assistance. This litigation will establish that states and other jurisdictions must provide intensive community-based services (ICBS) to Medicaid eligible children and youth under the Medicaid Act’s Early Prevention, Detection, Screening and Treatment (EPSDT) mandate. Without these intensive services, children and youth with mental health disabilities are unnecessarily institutionalized, or at serious risk of institutionalization, in violation of the community integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), identified in the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C.
Grant Contact: Holly O’Donnell, Chief Executive Officer, hollyo@bazelon.org, (202) 467-5730, ext. 1308
For over 50 years, the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) has advanced justice in support of young people by amplifying youth power, dismantling racism and other structural inequities. We focus on complex challenges that disproportionately affect children and communities of color and on solutions that require multiple public systems to change their policies, practices, and culture. We operate at the intersection of youth-serving systems including education, health, child welfare, immigration, juvenile justice, and child trafficking.
Our goal is to ensure public systems treat children and youth equitably, with compassion, and provide the opportunities each child needs to thrive; that racial disparities are eradicated; and that youth have a central role in designing the systems that impact them. To achieve this, our campaigns weave together impact litigation, policy development and implementation, partnerships with public agencies, demonstration sites, research, communications, and coalition building.
The Case: Representing children with disabilities, their parents/guardians, Disability Rights Florida, and the Florida Conference of the NAACP, D.P. v. School Board of Palm Beach County seeks to stop the School District of Palm Beach County (SDPBC) from illegally using police force to subject students, especially students with disabilities, to involuntary psychiatric examinations. The case holds significant implications for other jurisdictions where law enforcement is being inappropriately and illegally used when students experience mental health crises.
SDPBC police illegally use the Florida Mental Health Act (“the Baker Act”) to subject hundreds of students annually to involuntary psychiatric examinations, without parental input, consent and sometimes, despite objections. Police remove students, as young as five years old, from their classrooms, handcuff them, sometimes use hobble restraints, and transport them to psychiatric facilities, where they wait up to 72 hours for an examination. SDPBC police do not have mental health training or credentials. SDPBC police knowingly use the Baker Act on children whose behavior is disability-related, even when the behaviors do not meet the law’s criteria. They also seize students with disabilities when the district is aware of services that could prevent any need for such seizures. Additionally, they fail to consult mental health resources, including mobile crisis teams and the children's own therapists. As a result of this case, SDPBC will stop this harmful and disruptive practice against students with disabilities, and instead, provide more effective mental health supports.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), founded in 1984, promotes justice by defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education. Apart from its primary focus on direct legal services, NWIRP actively engages in impact litigation in federal courts to: (1) defend the constitutional and statutory rights of individuals in removal proceedings; (2) challenge the expansion of civil detention of immigrants in removal proceedings; and (3) establish the rights of noncitizens seeking immigration benefits. NWIRP is partnering with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance in their McDowell Foundation-funded litigation.
Since its founding in 2020, the National Immigration Litigation Alliance (NILA) has successfully litigated at least four high-impact cases of national scope. In summer 2020, NILA and NWIRP won a class action challenging USCIS’ failure to prioritize oath ceremonies post-COVID-19, resulting in the naturalization of 2,202 new voters. In December 2020, NILA, NWIRP, and co-counsel won a national class action resulting in a permanent injunction requiring immigration agencies to timely process requests for immigration case files. In July 2021, NILA and NWIRP settled a putative class action challenging USCIS’ rejection of applications because answers to certain questions were left blank, positively impacting 43,500 asylum applicants, and 17,000 survivors of domestic violence. NWIRP and NILA are currently litigating two other nationwide class actions, one challenging delays in processing asylum claims, and the other challenging USCIS’s rescission of a policy which previously allowed some recipients of Temporary Protected Status to seek lawful permanent resident status.
The Case: In Bianey Garcia Perez, et al., v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, et al., the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) and the National Immigration Litigation Alliance (NILA) are challenging U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) and the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s (EOIR) policies and practices that unlawfully deny work authorization for asylum seekers and withholding of removal applicants while their claims are pending adjudication beyond the six-month time period prescribed by the Immigration and Nationality Act. Due to USCIS’ and EOIR’s unlawful practices preventing them from qualifying for an employment authorization document (EAD), these individuals seeking protection from persecution are in dire financial straits.
By regulation, the running of this 180-day waiting period for employment authorization—referred to as “the asylum EAD clock”—may be suspended only for applicant-caused delay in adjudication. Plaintiffs challenge defendants’ recent policies and practices implemented in 2020, namely: stopping the asylum EAD clock without providing any written notice or an opportunity to challenge any inappropriate decisions stopping the clock. In addition, Plaintiffs challenge several specific policies that inappropriately stop the clock, including failing to restart the EAD clock where the applicant prevails on appeal after the application was initially denied. These policies prevent thousands of asylum seekers from being able to work to support themselves and their families. Through no fault of their own, these individuals are precluded from the right to work lawfully and left to scramble for assistance and resources while they wait for resolution of their claims.
Grant Contact: Matt Adams, Legal Director, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, (206) 957-8611, matt@nwirp.org
UPLC was founded by former coal miners and their widows in 1975. Its original mission was to secure black lung benefits for disabled coal miners; however, it quickly expanded beyond these origins and became a full-service, community-based legal clinic. Our community work focuses on tenants’ rights issues and Social Security disability benefits, and our statewide work involves protecting the civil rights of those incarcerated in Illinois’ prisons. For many of our clients, UPLC is their last and only legal resort against negligent or unethical landlords, a slow-moving and insensitive public benefits bureaucracy, or a prison system that violates civil rights.
The Case: In June 2016, UPLC brought Davis v. Jeffreys against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) on behalf of six prisoners who were facing, or had faced, extreme isolation in Illinois prisons. These individuals had been held in extreme isolation for between 6 months to 17 years. The conditions described by the prisoners included being confined, often for 24 hours a day, to small, airless cells with no natural light; reduced food; minimal yard time (and even then, alone in a bare concrete box). Cells are often infested with rodents and insects, are cold in the winter, and stiflingly hot in the summer. All these prisoners were deprived of meaningful contact with other people–including other prisoners and even their own family members. In June 2021, the case was certified as a class action. We are now in the process of completing discovery and collecting witness statements, looking towards a trial.
The case is part of a strategic national effort to challenge the overuse of solitary confinement in US prisons. UPLC has used its experience litigating this case to advise lawyers in both Texas and Florida who are challenging their states’ use of solitary. In addition, UPLC was one of the founding members of, and is still an active participant in, the national Stop Solitary campaign coordinated by the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
Grant Contact: Megan Groves, Director of Development and Communication, megan@uplcchicago.org (773) 769-1411