Immigration cases are often complicated, and their outcomes can affect entire families.
For Ben, who left his home country of Haiti in 2023, his deportation would affect his mother, a U.S. citizen in Boston, and the young niece he has cared for since his sister died about three years ago.
Through an interpreter, Ben told WBUR he decided to leave Haiti because of unstable conditions in the country. Haitians have lived through years of financial hardship, violence and political unrest, leading many to flee. Ben said he struggled to find stable housing for himself and his niece.
“There’s a lot of insecurity, so it’s not safe,” said Ben, 23, speaking in Haitian Creole.
Ben traveled through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico before coming to the U.S. He waited for about a year at the U.S.-Mexico border for an appointment with federal immigration officials. In 2024, they granted him a temporary, two-year authorization to live in the country, according to his attorney.
But at the same time his entry was approved, U.S. immigration officials also opened deportation proceedings against him, his lawyer said. Federal officials claimed he did not have the proper paperwork to stay in the country, according to Ben’s attorney.
Ben is fighting the deportation and trying to secure a green card. WBUR is only using Ben’s first name because he and his lawyer fear disclosing his identity could harm his pending immigration case.
He’s navigating the legal proceedings with help from a lawyer paid through a $5 million program that Massachusetts lawmakers added to the state budget for this fiscal year.
The program, known as the Massachusetts Access to Counsel Initiative, was created in response to President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdowns, including raids in Massachusetts.
Unlike most criminal defendants, people appearing in immigration courts typically have no right to a court-appointed attorney, and those who cannot afford legal representation often manage proceedings on their own.
The Massachusetts initiative provides pro bono legal assistance to immigrants who are facing removal. It is restricted to people whose incomes are 125% below the federal poverty line and who have no criminal charges.
Advocates have quickly scaled up the program in the months since the state Legislature funded the initiative. Lawmakers are now debating how to move forward with the fund as they craft next year’s state budget.
The Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, or MIRA, won the contract to administer the program. It has set up an intake hotline and hired 24 full-time immigration attorneys who work at legal aid organizations across the state.
“In addition to arresting so many more individuals, [the Trump] administration has made huge changes to immigration policy and practice, and has made due process nearly impossible for individuals who don’t have counsel helping them navigate the process,” said Elizabeth Sweet, executive director of MIRA.
Sweet said her organization has focused on hiring entry-level attorneys to grow the field of immigration lawyers in the state and manage the cost of the program. The attorneys earn an average of $80,000 a year and are required to take on a minimum number of cases, according to state officials.
“There was a real intention of this being an opportunity to just build capacity in this field,” Sweet said.
Ben reached out to the hotline in late January, and his case was assigned to attorney Branden Ladebush. Ladebush said he had less than a month to prepare before a key hearing for Ben’s green card.
But without the program, his client might not have been able to pursue the green card at all, Ladebush said.
“That’s why it’s so important,” he said.
Ben’s case is one of more than 400 that immigration attorneys hired through the state initiative have taken on since the program launched in the fall.
Another 697 people have been deemed eligible for services as of late March, and more than 6,000 people have called the program’s intake line, state officials said during a legislative hearing earlier this month.
The legal defense program addresses a “serious gap in access to legal representation at a time when it is urgently needed,” said Cristina Aguilera, executive director of the Massachusetts Office for Immigrants and Refugees, in a statement.
“It has brought new immigration attorneys into the field to expand capacity statewide and provide pro bono legal services across Massachusetts, helping to ensure that members of our immigrant communities have the legal representation they deserve at a time when their rights are increasingly under attack by President Trump and ICE,” Aguilera said.
Lawmakers and immigration advocates who support the program have argued that detained immigrants with a lawyer are 10 times more likely to win relief than those without representation.
Attorney Todd Pomerleau, a Boston-based immigration attorney whose nonprofit legal organization received $130,000 in grant funding through the state program, said it is difficult for people to navigate immigration cases even if they can afford a lawyer.
“But I can only imagine the struggle if you have no money at all or very limited means, and then you’re taken from your family,” Pomerleau said. “Nobody can help you. A lot of the people that are suffering are citizens of the commonwealth, too. There’s a lot of families where one relative in the family lacks immigration status. Well, what about the others that live here? They’re citizens.”
Immigration advocates have ramped up pressure on elected officials to pass more protections into law for immigrants and place new restrictions on federal immigration agents operating in the state.
Part of the push includes shuttling more cash into the legal defense fund. Sweet, with MIRA, said advocates want elected officials to include $15 million in the next state budget, triple what the program received this year.
But critics question whether this is the best use of limited taxpayer funds.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said it is a “controversial” use of public money to provide free legal services to immigrants who are facing a “very uphill battle” to stay in the U.S.
“We’ll have to wait and see the outcome of these cases to know if it’s actually a good investment of taxpayer money. We’ll have to see what the success rate is,” she said.
Some lawmakers pressed state officials at the legislative hearing earlier this month on what they believed was a slow pace of spending the funds already allocated for the initiative.
Officials from the Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants said they have only spent $1.5 million since the program launched in the fall. But Susan Church, the office’s chief operating officer, said they “certainly intend to spend more than that.”
“I don’t know that we’re going to spend every single penny of it, but we didn’t get started with lawyers in seats until the first week in December,” she said. “The full program has not run for 12 months yet.”
Other lawmakers want to make the legal defense fund permanent.
State Sen. Adam Gómez, a Springfield Democrat and member of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, said the initiative should be approved as standalone legislation, so it is no longer subject to the whims of the annual budget process.
In an interview with WBUR, Gómez argued free legal defense for immigrants is critical because deportation cases “can be life-altering.”
“This fund is important. We just have to figure out what it’s going to look like in the future,” he said. “And obviously, there’s still ongoing conversations with this piece of policy.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR