Pam Bondi Guts DOJ Program that Helps Illegal Migrants Fight Deportation Cases
Warner Todd Huston31 Mar 2026301
The Trump administration has gutted a Justice Department program that helped many thousands of illegal migrants fight the department’s own deportation cases.
“It’s going to cause serious problems within the immigration system,” Danielle DeWinter, the legal director of the pro-migration Immigration Project in Illinois, said.
Her group has used the Justice Department’s program to get advice and accreditation when fighting 948 cases where the federal government was trying to deport migrants.
In this latest salvo to combat illegal migration, the DOJ has effectively shut down the Recognition and Accreditation program, created in 1983, which is part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which was founded in the 1950s and was designed to hand federal funding to a large number of nonprofit organizations — including Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services — to provide qualified legal representation for low-income immigrants. The program gave training and certification to immigrants rights activists so that they had legal standing to represent migrants in immigration courts.
But this month, the senior DOJ attorneys who oversaw the program were reassigned and the program was effectively neutered. This hobbled the program because the reassignments left no one in the office qualified to “approve or renew” the certifications, according to CBS News.
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2026/03/31/pam-bondi-guts-doj-program-that-helps-illegal-migrants-fight-deportation-cases/
