Aliens Are Entitled to 'Effective' Attorneys?

Deportations of illegal aliens may slow down now that Attorney General Eric Holder has reversed former AG Mukasey and will now grant illegals the right to an "effective" attorney.

Mukasey held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel applied only in criminal matters. Immigration, unless there are crimes involved, is a civil matter. Under the Mukasey standard

Immigrants in removal cases are allowed to have counsel if they wish, but they must retain lawyers on their own, at no expense to the taxpayers.

This reversed a situation that had developed over the years where the system had bogged down. As NR's Andy McCarthy explains:

About 20 years ago, however, immigration judges (who tend to have been immigration lawyers before becoming immigration judges) fabricated a right to effective assistance of counsel for removable aliens under — you guessed it — the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (that bottomless reservoir of "our values" which, of course, guarantees no such thing).

What was the practical effect of this? Well, the government would go through the burden of trying to remove from the country illegal aliens and criminal aliens; after losing and being ordered removed from the U.S., the aliens would then complain about the purported incompetence of their lawyers (the privately retained attorneys for whom the government and the public were in no way responsible); then, immigration judges would entertain those claims and, if persuaded that the private lawyer might have been ineffective, they would vacate the removal order, causing the government to bear the burden, and the public to bear the expense, of doing it all over again. And you wonder why no one ever gets deported?

AG Mukasey decided to end all this nonsense. He ruled (as the AG is entitled to do in immigration matters) that aliens in removal proceedings had no right to effective assistance of counsel. In so ruling, he was following a number of federal appeals court decisions which held that there is no such right.

[SNIP]

[F]or the vast majority of cases, it was absurd to penalize the American people for the alleged errors of a lawyer the removable alien had no right to have in the first place — a lawyer over whose performance the public had no control. Today, AG Holder reversed AG Mukasey's ruling, in a two-and-a-half page opinion that analyzes none of the pertinent law and does not address the constitutional issues.

Believe it or not, Holder claims his two-and-a-half pages was more thorough than Mukasey's 34-page opinion.

But the ACLU is happy.