DACA legal services: One federal policy, different local implementation approaches

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• Author: Shannon Gleeson,Els Graauw
• Date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12223

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

DACA legal services: One federal policy, different

local implementation approaches

Shannon Gleeson

1

|Els de Graauw

2

1

School of Industrial and Labor Relations,

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

2

Department of Political Science, Baruch

College, CUNY, New York City,

New York, USA

Correspondence

Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University, School

of Industrial and Labor Relations, 379 Ives

Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901, USA.

Email: smg338@cornell.edu

Funding information

National Science Foundation, Grant/Award

Numbers: SES-1354115, SES-1445436

Abstract

In the United States, the absence of federal funding

and coordination for immigration legal services often

means that local resources determine immigrants’

access to justice. Many of these resources go toward

supporting immigrants caught in the detention and

deportation system. Yet local support is also critical for

implementing federal benefits programs such as the

2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

program. In this article, we draw on 146 interviews

with representatives of legal services providers and

their nonprofit collaborators in three immigrant-dense

metropolitan areas—the Greater Houston Area, the

New York City Metro Area, and the San Francisco

Bay Area—to analyze the distinct, place-specific ser-

vice and collaboration models that have emerged over

the last decade to meet demand for DACA implemen-

tation support. Specifically, we examine how local con-

text shapes the types of actors that immigrants can turn

to for immigration legal services, and how they have

coordinated on the ground in distinct ways during a

time of increasing uncertainty.

1|INTRODUCTION

Unlike legally mandated access to counsel in criminal court cases (i.e., Gideon v. Wainwright,

1963), in the United States there is presently no such directive for civil cases, including most

immigration proceedings. Since 1974, however, the U.S. federal government has provided lim-

ited civil legal aid through the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in efforts to close the access-

to-justice gap. This, along with significant philanthropic funding to support legal services for

the poor, has built the patchwork of “poverty law”support in the United States for a range of

issues, including housing, public benefits, employment, and sometimes immigration support.

The logic of these programs is rooted in an effort to address inequality, with unambiguous

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12223

©2023 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

434 Law & Policy. 2023;45:434–458.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo

evidence that lawyers matter for outcomes in almost all types of court cases (Poppe &

Rachlinski, 2015).

Over time, following trends in welfare state retrenchment, poverty law efforts have moved

“downward, outward, and beyond”(Selbin & Cummings, 2015). As federal resources have

waned, increasingly civil legal aid is provided by private attorneys and nonprofit legal services

providers, who depend on philanthropic contributions and occasional state and local govern-

ment grants that rarely cover immigration legal services. And given the citizenship restrictions

for federal LSC funding (including for some categories of legal immigrants), the large popula-

tion of undocumented immigrants increasingly criminalized by federal policies are chronically

underserved. This gap has underscored the need for these local sources of legal services funding,

which remain piecemeal and vary across place.

In this article, we focus on one emblematic case of the “decentralization, privatization, and

globalization”of access to justice through the lens of U.S. immigration programs (Selbin &

Cummings, 2015). The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which

has provided over 825,000 undocumented youth nationwide a temporary stay of deportation

and work authorization, is the last major quasi-legalization effort in the United States and pro-

vides an important template for considering future potential legalization efforts (Singer

et al., 2015). We consider how this program was realized locally for the thousands of immi-

grants seeking DACA status. Without federal support for DACA’s implementation, and with

LSC-funded organizations unable to expend resources on its rollout, nonprofit organizations

and state and local governments were left scrambling to help individuals access DACA’s bene-

fits. The resulting gap between demand and supply for legal services was enormously conse-

quential for immigrants’ability to access the DACA program. Not only was it imperative to

screen applicants for criminal bars that could have serious deportation implications and to

determine if they might actually qualify for other, more permanent forms of relief, but appli-

cants also needed help navigating the exceedingly confusing DACA government bureaucracy.

Over 10years out from its 2012 creation as an executive initiative by President Obama,

DACA did not implement itself. It was hundreds of local legal partnerships across the

country—not one unified federal response—that eventually helped these 825,000 undocumented

youth secure DACA status. This article considers the factors that shaped the varying legal ser-

vices responses to the nationwide need for DACA assistance, and the outreach that soon

followed amidst the hope for even broader reforms. We find that the private bar, state and local

government actors, civil society organizations, and philanthropists have played differing roles

and collaborated in distinct ways, depending on the local context in which they operated. We

focus especially on how the demographic makeup, local politics, and civil society density in a

particular place have influenced the scope and coordination of DACA legal services.

Findings from our comparative case studies spanning three immigrant-dense metropolitan

areas reveal distinct local strategies to implementing federal reforms. Houston’s small govern-

ment context elevates the importance of local philanthropy and requires a legal services land-

scape that is nimble and works closely with the private bar. Meanwhile, support from New

York’s pro-immigrant state and local government leadership combines with a deep bench of

nonprofit advocates to allow for a tight division of labor for case referrals, though without a

single coordination node. Finally, advocates in the San Francisco Bay Area have taken a nota-

bly more regional approach to coordinating legal services that builds on long-standing collabo-

rations between civil society organizations and generous funding from cities and counties and

prominent local philanthropists. We find that each of these approaches has benefits and liabili-

ties, reflecting the resources and political openings of a place.

In what follows, we first review how localities have varied in their response to federal immi-

gration policies like DACA and consider how population distribution, local politics, and civil

society density have shaped these varying approaches. We then turn to findings from

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