Kansas City’s immigration court is on the fifth floor of a nondescript downtown office building.
The area is better known for the bustling shops of Crown Center to the south, or nearby Washington Square Park, a potential site for a new Royals stadium.
Yet thousands of life-changing decisions for immigrant families are routinely handed down in the courtroom on Grand Boulevard.
Three immigration court judges can determine if someone is given the chance to continue seeking asylum after facing dire threats in their birth nation. They can decide if an immigrant might be removed from the U.S. within weeks, or if they’ll be given time to find an attorney who might be able to help them with a case.
Access to an attorney is key.
It’s one factor that sets immigration courts apart from criminal courts, which are far more familiar to most people.
In immigration court, there is no universal right to a government-appointed attorney.
Because deportation is classified as a civil sanction, not criminal, immigrants facing removal are not given the constitutional protections under the Sixth Amendment that are provided to criminal defendants, according to the American Immigration Council.
This differs from the criminal justice system, where people facing even one day in jail will have a court-appointed attorney, if they can’t afford one.
“It’s like a system that is completely stacked against immigrants,” said Clare Murphy Shaw, executive director of the Asylum Clinic Kansas City, which primarily focuses on pro bono help for immigrant children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians.
Only 23.4% of immigrants, including unaccompanied children, had an attorney with them when they were ordered to be removed from the country in May 2025, according to government data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Legal experts fear even those percentages will drop as programs focused on assisting vulnerable populations, like children, struggle to maintain funding under the Trump administration.
Legal representation increases the likelihood that a case will be decided in the immigrant’s favor.
The American Immigration Council in 2016 found that detained immigrants were more than 10 times as likely to successfully defend against deportation when they were represented by counsel.
But reaching an attorney to take a case, or even a consultation, is increasingly difficult.
Not all immigration attorneys in Missouri and Kansas handle time-sensitive removal or asylum cases. Some focus their practice on visas for businesses, or family reunification.
The sheer volume of cases before the nation’s immigration courts is another complicating factor.
There are currently 3.5 million cases backlogged, including 52,533 in Kansas City’s court, which is the only one in Missouri and Kansas.
Unlike civil and criminal courts, the nation’s 71 immigration courts are not independent of the Department of Justice.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has made it clear that all judges, including those outside of immigration courts, can be subject to discipline as the Trump administration pursues its mass deportation effort.
“Nobody is above the law, not even a judge,” Bondi said.
Bondi made the comment in April, after a Wisconsin circuit judge was arrested and accused of helping an immigrant evade agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Immigration courts on trial
The nation’s immigration courts, and the lack of a right to an appointed counsel, have long been criticized.
Legislation has been introduced to create a national system of representation for indigent immigrants facing removal, but it’s never passed into law.
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, sponsored such legislation in 2023.
Jayapal recently held an online shadow hearing for Congress to discuss what she termed the due process crisis within the nation’s immigration courts.
During the session, immigration court’s lack of independence from the Department of Justice was described as a long-standing structural flaw from which other problems follow.
Immigration judges can find themselves caught between upholding the rule of law or maintaining their jobs, said Ashley Tabaddor, a former California immigration judge.
Tabaddor served as the Biden administration’s chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Homeland Security “is represented by trained counsel, but noncitizens have no right to appointed counsel, even in life or death matters,” Tabaddor said.
Increasingly, the limited assistance once offered immigrants by the government is being eliminated, Tabaddor said.
And much of it was advisory, not legal representation.
Programs helped detained immigrants understand basic aspects of the government’s case against them. Sometimes, the assistance was as simple as telling someone in a language that they understood which jail they were being held in, and in what state.
Most of the programs have been terminated by the Trump administration.
One example is a federal program that offered legal representation to immigrants whom a judge had found to be incompetent, such as due to a severe mental health disorder.
Only three states still offer that program — Washington, Arizona and California — because of a court order, said Sara Van Hofwegen, managing director of legal access programs at the Acacia Center for Justice.
Acacia manages the federal grants still in place that are dispersed to legal clinics around the nation, including Kansas City’s Asylum Clinic.
“What limited access they had to fairness and due process is being taken away every day, and it puts people more and more at risk,” Van Hofwegen said.
Many of the federally funded programs long had bipartisan support because the efforts made the courts more efficient, Van Hofwegen said. That bipartisan support is going by the wayside.
“There’s very little room for mercy in the system,” said Murphy Shaw of the Asylum Clinic KC.
The nonprofit clinic, established in 2015, provides pro bono help to certain categories of immigrants, including the asylum cases of Afghans.
It also receives some federal funds to represent unaccompanied children.
The Trump administration moved to terminate that funding this spring. After a California court injunction, the money was released while the issue is being litigated.
Changing policy from the White House continues to complicate the work of the clinic’s attorneys.
“It’s like sands shifting under our feet,” Murphy Shaw said. “It’s very, very hard to get a grasp on what’s actually happening and how to advise clients.”
Cases triaged, not enough immigration attorneys
The government maintains a database of pro bono legal help in each state.
The list, as it is known, is made available to immigrants who come before immigration judges.
It’s kept in a file managed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
For the Kansas City court, the EOIR names two St. Louis agencies — the Migrant & Immigrant Community Action Project and the St. Francis Community Services/Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry.
Neither program accepts clients from the western part of the state.
Finding legal help among area immigration attorneys is also difficult.
The Missouri/Kansas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has about 240 members.
Not all live in or focus their practice in either state, said Genevra Alberti, the immediate past chair of the Missouri/Kansas AILA chapter.
And less than half of the attorneys in the chapter accept cases involving the defense of migrants targeted for removal, said Alberti.
Those with removal expertise are overwhelmed with the crush of immigrants being detained, a record 59,000 nationwide as of late June.
“There just are not enough attorneys to handle the volume,” Alberti said.
A government system, the ICE detainee locator, isn’t updating quickly as people are being moved among jails, local attorneys said.
This makes it more difficult for attorneys and family members to locate someone to prepare a defense.
For immigrants detained by ICE, a best-case scenario is having legal representation before being taken into custody.
That’s the situation a Kansas City mother from Guatemala faced. She has long been aided by the attorneys at Martinez Immigration Law, where Alberti is employed.
The firm had her paperwork, her history and all necessary documents when she was detained by ICE in June after showing up for a routine check-in.
The woman is seeking the right to remain in the country on humanitarian grounds because her youngest child is autistic and largely nonverbal.
For other people, local attorneys are too busy to even schedule a consultation.
“You worry about all the people who need help, but then you’ve got to worry more about the people who you already are helping, because you have an ethical duty to do so,” Alberti said.
Another local woman, a longtime area resident originally from Mexico, keeps a running list of immigration attorneys in her head.
She wants to be prepared, just in case.
She has a temporary, renewable reprieve from running afoul of immigration agents through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. DACA helps people who were brought to the U.S. as children, usually by a parent.
Triage is how attorney Michael Sharma-Crawford described how his office is being forced to decide whom they can help with legal assistance — and which immigrants will not receive any help at all.
William E. Hanna, a former attorney at Stinson, is the latest to join the firm, bringing the number to four lawyers at Sharma-Crawford Attorneys at Law.
Hanna began doing some cases pro bono in recent years, taking classes to learn the complexities of immigration law.
“I wish the immigration system worked the way we want it to work,” Hanna said as he unpacked boxes and set up his new office.
A common scenario is that someone will receive notice of a court date. But then they can’t retain an attorney in time to file the necessary paperwork, said Trinidad Raj Molina, accompaniment organizer with Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation KC.
An asylum application is an example, Molina said.
The judge ends up, sometimes through an interpreter, explaining what should have happened, knowing that the person might have qualified to remain in the country.
“It’s frustrating for everybody when there could be a better solution of having a universal legal representation system,” Molina said.
Limited help, soaring need
Programs like the Equity Corps of Oregon and Innovation Law Lab have devised ways to fund pro bono counsel in immigration courts, Molina said.
And locally, several organizations sponsor clinics offering limited legal help, such as filling out forms that need to be filed with the government.
A Vera Institute of Justice poll in 2019 found widespread public support for government-funded attorneys in immigration court — 87% of people surveyed, including 73% of Trump voters.
AILA has long pressed for a nationwide program to represent indigent people facing removal proceedings.
Advocates feel that the need for qualified and ethical representation heightened in early June.
That’s when immigration judges were advised by the government to begin dismissing cases when asked to do so by Homeland Security attorneys. In those situations, the government asks for cases to be dismissed, preventing the noncitizen from having more time to argue their case. Then Homeland Security pursues “expedited removal,” which can involve mandatory, immediate detention.
ICE agents were waiting in some courts to immediately take immigrants into custody for expedited removal.
In Kansas City’s court, a handful of such instances occurred. But not within the past few weeks, Molina said.
Advocates credit the presence of volunteer court monitors who are ready to witness whatever transpires for the change. Cellphones, video or other recording equipment are not allowed in the court.
Tabaddor is among those voices highly critical of the new approach by Homeland Security and ICE.
She contends that the Trump administration is attempting to bypass the role of immigration courts, creating situations where there is “no judge, no hearing and virtually no review.”
“As a former judge, I can tell you when one part of the framework breaks, when judges are undermined, when legal support disappears, when people are too afraid to show up, the entire system fails,” she said. “Not just for immigrants, but for all.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
