Neutralizing Advocacy: Organizational Marginalization and the Erosion of the Legal Profession within the U.S. Immigration Bureaucracy

• In Event: The State and the Practice of Law

Abstract

How do ever-shifting, increasingly restrictive immigration policies and processes impact the operation of legal service providers? Based on over four years of participant observation at a legal aid organization serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, along with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 98 Los Angeles-based immigration attorneys, this paper centers the perspectives of immigration attorneys to explore how recent shifts to immigration policy risk hollowing out the infrastructure of legal counsel available to people seeking asylum. The paper develops the concept of professional neutralization, a process through which state policies systematically render the well-established norms, practices, and tools of a profession obsolete. Through professional neutralization, the state both undermines crucial infrastructures of support for would-be claimants—in this case, people seeking asylum—and produces a crisis of professional purpose and identity. As the U.S. immigration bureaucracy undermines legal practice, it thus not only obstructs access to justice but also fuels legal cynicism, disillusionment, and a broader crisis of institutional legitimacy.

Author

• Catherine Louise Crooke, University of California-Los Angeles