Attorney General Pam Bondi's Justice Department has effectively shut down a decades-old federal program that trained and certified non-attorney representatives to help illegal immigrants contest their own deportation cases, a move that strips a key resource from the network of nonprofits working to keep foreign nationals in the country.
Senior DOJ attorneys who oversaw the Recognition and Accreditation program were reassigned this month, Breitbart News reported, leaving no one in the office qualified to approve or renew the certifications that gave nonprofit workers legal standing in immigration courts. CBS News confirmed the reassignments left the office unable to process those certifications.
The DOJ maintains the program has not been formally eliminated because it is "established by regulation." But the practical effect is the same: the office has basically ceased being able to fulfill its charge.
For millions of Americans who have watched successive administrations subsidize the legal defense of people in the country illegally, the move raises an obvious question. Why was the Justice Department running a program that helped illegal immigrants fight the Justice Department's own enforcement actions in the first place?
The Recognition and Accreditation program sat inside the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the DOJ branch that operates the nation's immigration courts. EOIR was founded in the 1950s. The R&A program itself was created in 1983 and grew steadily over the following four decades.
Its purpose was straightforward: certify non-lawyers at nonprofit organizations so they could represent immigrants, including illegal immigrants facing removal, in those same immigration courts. By 2023, the office had greatly expanded the number of accredited representatives on its rolls.
A 2023 Villanova University publication titled "The Crisis of Unrepresented Immigrants: Vastly Increasing the Number of Accredited Representatives Offers the Best Hope for Resolving It" laid out the scope. The program involved more than 850 nonprofit organizations. Those groups were not all traditional immigration legal shops. The Villanova researchers noted the roster included "public libraries, job training and workforce development programs, domestic violence shelters and treatment programs, English language programs, labor unions, parish- and faith unit, based charitable organizations and ethnic ministries, family resource centers, DREAMer programs, and other student groups."
Between 2010 and 2020, accredited non-attorney representatives helped 7,779 migrants with their removal cases, the Villanova publication found. That is nearly 8,000 deportation proceedings in which the federal government was, in effect, funding one side of the courtroom while prosecuting the other.
The arrangement had a built-in absurdity that went unquestioned for years. Taxpayers funded the immigration courts. Taxpayers funded the DOJ attorneys who brought removal cases. And taxpayers funded the DOJ office that certified the people fighting those cases on behalf of illegal immigrants. Bondi's DOJ has scored a series of legal wins by identifying and dismantling exactly these kinds of contradictions inside the federal bureaucracy.
The loudest objections have come from the nonprofit groups that depended on the program for their legal standing. Danielle DeWinter, the legal director of the Immigration Project in Illinois, told reporters the change will ripple through the system.
"It's going to cause serious problems within the immigration system. It's already an extremely complicated process, and it's going to have more individuals who are now working through that process without the proper knowledge of it, of the system itself."
DeWinter's group used the DOJ program to obtain advice and accreditation while fighting 948 cases in Central and Southern Illinois, WGLT reported. The Immigration Project is funded in part by Yield Giving, a philanthropic initiative founded by Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
DeWinter also worried that her organization's pending applications for new accreditation may not be approved now that the office has no qualified staff to process them.
She framed the program's mission in sympathetic terms. As DeWinter put it:
"R&A programs and other programs that fund legal services and legal providers, their whole job is helping people get those papers, helping them to be secure, helping them to find stability in the United States based off of relief that they are legally eligible to apply for."
Note the framing: "helping them to find stability in the United States." That is a charitable description of a program whose core function was helping people ordered removed from the country stay here longer, or permanently. The groups listed in the program's orbit included Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services, organizations with long histories of immigrant advocacy that also receive substantial public and private funding.
The R&A shutdown fits a pattern. Since taking over at DOJ, Bondi has moved methodically to expose and dismantle programs that embedded immigration advocacy inside the federal law enforcement apparatus. The reassignment of senior attorneys, rather than a formal regulatory repeal, suggests the administration chose the fastest available lever.
That approach has drawn criticism from immigration advocates who argue the program still exists on paper and should therefore continue operating. The DOJ's own statement that the program is "established by regulation" could become a legal pressure point if advocacy groups decide to challenge the effective shutdown in court.
Several questions remain unanswered. How many attorneys were reassigned? Which DOJ officials ordered the reassignments? And what specific regulation does the department cite when it says the program still technically exists? None of those details have been publicly disclosed.
What is clear is the operational result. An office that once processed certifications for more than 850 organizations now has no one qualified to do so. Pending applications sit in limbo. And the pipeline that fed non-attorney advocates into immigration courtrooms has gone dry.
Critics of the move will frame it as an attack on due process. But the program was never about due process in the constitutional sense. Illegal immigrants in removal proceedings already have the right to hire an attorney at their own expense. What the R&A program provided was something different: a taxpayer-adjacent system that trained, certified, and empowered nonprofit workers to serve as quasi-lawyers fighting deportation on behalf of people who entered or remained in the country unlawfully.
Bondi has made clear through a series of recent moves, including announcements that caught Democrats off guard, that the DOJ under her leadership will not maintain programs at cross-purposes with immigration enforcement. The R&A shutdown is consistent with that posture.
The Villanova researchers who studied the program described its beneficiaries as including "DREAMer programs" and "other student groups." That language reveals who built and sustained the program over four decades: an advocacy ecosystem that treated the Justice Department as a partner in resisting the Justice Department's own enforcement mission.
For years, Bondi has faced political resistance from Democrats who object to nearly every enforcement action the administration takes. The R&A program's quiet dismantling will generate another round of outrage from the same quarters.
But the basic math has not changed. A department that prosecutes immigration violations should not simultaneously certify the people fighting those prosecutions. Bondi ended that arrangement. The only surprise is that it took this long.
