“You Suffer A Lot”

Immigrants with Disabilities Face Barriers in Immigration Court

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Immigrants with disabilities face many barriers as they navigate deportation proceedings in U.S. immigration courts, where they must gather and submit evidence, testify, and present their case, often without a lawyer. These proceedings are adversarial, confusing, and terrifying for many immigrants, particularly people facing deportation to persecution or torture. As detailed in this report, the barriers that disabled immigrants face are exacerbated by a lack of resources and information about immigrants’ rights under disability law in immigration court proceedings, absence of an established protocol for exercising those rights, denials of reasonable accommodations and safeguards to meaningfully participate in their proceedings, the use of detention to jail people during their immigration court cases, and disability discrimination in immigration court, including bias, stigma, and hostility from immigration judges. These barriers and harms violate federal disability law, Constitutional due process protections, and immigration law.

Federal laws and regulations, including the Rehabilitation Act and Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency regulations, prohibit disability discrimination. Under the Rehabilitation Act and its implementing regulations, immigrants with disabilities are entitled to reasonable accommodations in immigration court proceedings. Case law binding on immigration courts separately requires judges to evaluate and provide safeguards to immigrants who are unable to participate in their proceedings due to mental disabilities. However, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that oversees immigration court, does not have a comprehensive disability policy, process for requesting accommodations, or publicly identifiable EOIR staff who are available for disability-related questions and concerns.

Failures by immigration courts to comply with disability law and provide adequate accommodations underscore the urgent need for EOIR to develop public guidance on disability access and accommodations. President Biden issued a series of Executive Orders in January 2021 and February 2023, requiring federal agencies to take steps to advance equity, including for people with disabilities. Both Executive Orders instruct the head of each agency to identify potential barriers that underserved communities, including people with disabilities, may face in accessing agency programs, and to produce a plan to address those barriers. DOJ’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan identifies equal access to justice as a goal, and states that the Department will “strive to remove obstacles that prevent meaningful access to counsel and courts for members of underserved communities.” These mandates provide EOIR with an important opportunity to develop necessary, and long overdue, disability access policy.

EOIR should, in consultation with disability rights and immigration rights stakeholders, develop comprehensive disability nondiscrimination and access policies, including by creating a simplified reasonable accommodation request and review process, appointing disability access coordinators, and instituting regular immigration judge training on disability law, nondiscrimination, and specific disability categories. Human Rights First’s full recommendations are included below in this report’s recommendations section.

This report is based on research conducted by Human Rights First between September 2022 and April 2023, including 49 interviews with attorneys, advocates, and people seeking asylum, and information on 123 immigrants with disabilities in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Washington D.C., and Virginia who underwent immigration court proceedings, data on complaints submitted to the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) received through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Human Rights First, other publicly available government statistics, civil rights violations complaints, published investigations by other human rights organizations, and media reports.

Key Findings

• Though federal law and regulations prohibit disability discrimination in immigration court proceedings and require reasonable accommodations for immigrants with disabilities, there are no public EOIR policy documents, directives, training materials, or instructions for requesting disability accommodations, or other documents on disability access in immigration court proceedings. Lack of EOIR guidance on disability access has contributed to non-compliance with federal law and regulations guaranteeing disability access, depriving people with disabilities of a meaningful opportunity to participate in their immigration court proceedings.
• d/Deaf and hard of hearing immigrants have been prevented from communicating effectively in immigration court or understanding their proceedings due to immigration judges’ lack of basic understanding of how being deaf impacts a person’s ability to communicate, failure to grant accommodations, deficient interpretation, failure by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide access to communication services for detained d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, and egregious medical and mental health neglect in ICE jails. Immigrants impacted by these rights violations include a young d/Deaf man denied communication accommodations because the judge stated he “had been able to speak” in a hearing ten years prior without addressing the man’s ability to hear or the fact that the man had gradually become deaf due to brain tumors he developed the same year as his prior hearing; a d/Deaf Salvadoran asylum seeker who could not understand what was happening in court because the judge disregarded his, his attorney’s, and a deaf education expert’s objections that the court’s Salvadoran Sign Language interpreter did not sign competently; and a detained d/Deaf man who could not understand the sign language interpreter who was signing through video-teleconferencing on a small screen far from the man, with poor connection quality, but was forced to proceed even after the interpreter raised these issues to the court.
• Blind and low vision people face barriers and discrimination throughout the immigration court process, including inability to read written EOIR communications, difficulty arranging transportation to hearings, challenges navigating the courthouse, lack of EOIR resources on how to request accommodations for blind or low vision immigrants, and ICE’s failure to provide basic vision services to blind and low vision immigrants in detention, such as prescription glasses, which has prevented immigrants in detention from being able to see who is speaking to them in court or read and complete applications for relief.
• EOIR has failed to provide accommodations for some immigrants with physical disabilities, such as by ensuring that all immigration courts are physically accessible or providing free transportation to hearings where free transportation programs for people with disabilities are not available. Lack of appropriate accommodations stigmatizes people with disabilities and compounds the difficulty and stress of preparing for and attending a hearing. Immigration court failures to inquire into competency issues and provide appropriate accommodations harms people with physical disabilities. One man with cerebral palsy, a condition which affects his ability to speak, endured a hearing where the judge made no inquiries into his disability. The man did not receive assistance until a legal organization intervened. Horrific medical neglect and discriminatory use of solitary confinement (sometimes referred to as “administrative segregation” or “disciplinary segregation”) in ICE detention against immigrants with physical disabilities further deprives them of a fair opportunity to present their case.

Read the full report.