Just before 9 a.m. on a recent day, Karla Guevara Olivas hustled through the security line inside one of Chicago’s two immigration courts. She opened a small office near the door, put her things down and made her way out to the waiting room, where nearly every chair was occupied.

She cleared her throat and launched into a brief orientation, speaking first in Spanish and then in English.

“My name is Karla,” she said. “I work with the National Immigrant Justice Center. I run the legal help desk. Please raise your hand if you need help.”

The room was almost full and regarded her in near silence. Many people waiting were dressed nicely, in sweaters embroidered with pearls and dress slacks. Some held babies, trying in vain to quiet them.

Guevera Olivas was doing her best to offer a condensed version of the kind of help that is typically only available through a lawyer, walking clients through their first interactions with the system in the hopes that they’ll be better equipped to make their cases on their own.

There is an old saying that people who represent themselves in court effectively have a fool for a lawyer. And that’s exactly the situation that many of the people Guevera Olivas spoke to that day were in, but not by choice.

According to the immigration data clearinghouse TRAC, 1 in 4 of the roughly 77,000 immigrants with cases pending in Chicago had formal legal representation. About 30% of the immigrants with court cases living in Cook County overall were recorded as having an attorney.

That is in large part because, unlike criminal prosecution, the U.S. immigration system does not entitle respondents to an attorney. A recently released study of a program that provided legal representation to hundreds of detained immigrants in Chicago’s court underscored the saying about the perils of pro se litigation, finding that people who had assistance from attorneys were almost five times more likely to receive relief that allowed them to continue their lives in the U.S.

Knowing the options

Olivia Abrecht, an attorney who represented people through the pilot program, said she’s seen many people come before a judge not knowing their options, much less with a grasp on the strategy that would offer the best shot at continuing their lives. That lack of knowledge has severe consequences: “People are forced to accept removal when they otherwise would have fought their case.”

In the absence of court-appointed counsel, immigrants fighting removal proceedings have a patchwork of options. They may argue their own cases before a judge. They may get help preparing a specific element of their case like residency paperwork. They may hire an attorney, though many find that prohibitively expensive.

In Chicago and elsewhere, the last decade has brought a surge in attempts to strengthen that patchwork — from full-fledged pro bono programs to legal hotlines to drop-in workshops — as the country’s backlog of pending removal proceedings has skyrocketed and the national debate over immigration reform has become red meat for politicians like President Donald Trump.

But the study found that the growth in the number of removal proceedings has increased so quickly that it’s outstripped the growth in the number of lawyers available to represent people.

Cook County is one of a handful of localities around the country that’s established publicly run deportation defense programs, following the lead of places like New York and California’s Alameda County. The Cook County public defender’s office started its own immigration division in 2020 — first to counsel to any noncitizen Cook County resident facing ordinary criminal charges and, starting in 2022, to represent people facing possible removal.

Their capacity is low, but growing. There are eight lawyers working in the division, with plans to hire additional staffers in the next year. The unit’s supervisor, Hena Mansori, estimated they’d need 200 attorneys to represent every pending removal case that qualified for their services.

The unit was one of four groups to participate in the universal representation pilot through MIDA, representing 80 of the 282 cases covered in the program period.

Manpower aside, the turbulence that’s defined the second Trump administration’s approach to immigration has leached into the services that are available as organizations scramble to respond to the latest sea change for bond eligibility, the appeal process or shifting priorities handed down from immigration enforcement officials.

Mara Weaver Boshart manages the National Immigrant Justice Center’s legal help desk and hotline, one of the many services in Chicago “trying to bridge the gap” for immigrants without full legal representation. She sees much of her team’s work as working to “keep an emergency at bay.”

“Our role is to try to give people information and clarity and help them solve mysteries,” she said. “But with how things have been run for the last year and couple months, we just never know what crisis is going to hit next.”

‘If we have the capacity to help you’

In the waiting room on the 15th floor of the building at 55 E. Monroe St., Guevara Olivas told the waiting respondents that they may hear government attorneys ask to send them to a country besides the one they’re from. She urged them to speak up if they heard that, and to tell the judge they opposed that move.

“If that occurs in your case, please contact the help desk so we can determine if we have the capacity to help you,” she said.

People at final hearings who lose their cases should also contact the help desk, she said. They may be able to help file an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Three screens and a whiteboard lined with paper printouts listed immigrants who have a case up that day. People clustered in front of the whiteboard and dragged their fingers down the list, searching for their names and the courtroom where their case was assigned.

Everyone searching for their name was on release while their deportation cases made their way through the courts. The majority of those people did not have an attorney to represent them.

Without lawyers, people on release have a range of possible options to get help handling their cases, though most pro bono legal aid is geared toward people held in custody while their cases advance. In Chicago, attorneys like Guevara Olivas run a physical help desk two days a week out of 55 E. Monroe.

Weaver Boshart, the NIJC legal supervisor, said people approach the desk or come to their hotline appointment with all kinds of needs. Sometimes they just need one question answered, or help preparing a specific set of paperwork ahead of a court appearance. Others end up with referrals to other organizations who will take on their case for the long term.

Since last May, she added, the hotline has seen more friends and family of people detained call in looking to get help for someone in custody. Different trends dominate calls to the hotline and visits to the desk depending on what is going on around the immigration system.

Right now, it’s common to see people asking for help filing appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews the decisions of immigration judges. But the turbulence out of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees both the board and the immigration courts themselves, is making it harder to advise people on what their next move should be.

“The biggest challenge for us is just this ever-shifting landscape,” Weaver Boshart said. “It’s tough for attorneys, but even more for clients.”

In March, a federal court ruling blocked a new policy from the Board of Immigration Appeals that would have allowed it to issue nearly automatic dismissals to any appealed case, as well as a companion rule that would have shortened the timeline to appeal from 30 days to 10. The ruling came down the day before those changes were set to take effect. Another legal battle has been unfolding since late last year over whether detained immigrants are eligible for money bond. The courts themselves have lost judges through departures and firings — nine have left the Chicago court since the beginning of last year.

Then there are the shifting priorities and initiatives of the Trump administration, like the “rocket docket,” a term for a group of fast-tracked asylum cases, or the recent tendency by DHS lawyers to try to dismiss as many cases as possible before a final hearing.

“We’re trying to gather as much information as we can and identify trends and come up with strategies and legal arguments to respond to these emerging issues,” Weaver Boshart said. “So it’s challenging for us as practitioners, but also for our participants, it’s what keeps the fear going.”

‘You don’t get a second chance’

Back at 55 E. Monroe, a handwritten sheet of paper, taped beneath the screens where immigrants were searching for their names and courtroom assignments, read “detained” — over another sheet of paper with a list of names.

The people on that list were in federal custody, often hundreds of miles away from the judge handling their case — not to mention family, friends and even the limited options for legal representation that greet the people who are managing their cases while on release.

Shayna Kessler, the director of the Vera Institute’s Advancing Universal Representation initiative, said many deportation defense programs, including MIDA, emphasize detained immigrants because the isolation presents so many additional barriers.

“Certainly representation for everyone is what is needed to build a system that does uphold due process and is fair and ensures people can defend their rights and avoid wrongful deportation,” Kessler said.

Someone in custody has limited communication with the outside world, access to translation services or evidence associated with their case. All of that, Kessler said, combined with the fact that detained cases tend to move about twice as fast as nondetained ones, creates “incredible difficulty” putting together a defense.

Abrecht also noted that someone in custody who has a good case to lawfully stay in the U.S. may still accept a deportation order or voluntary departure out of what she called detention fatigue, which “can mean real harm to their family who may be left behind, to their workplaces and communities.”

When MIDA started its universal representation pilot program in 2022, the group sent attorneys from four organizations — the Resurrection Project, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Cook County Public Defender and the Immigration Project — to select master calendar hearings, a sort of judicial cattle call for immigrants with cases in the early stages of the legal process. A judge then explained the representation program and offered anyone there without counsel the chance to reschedule their hearing and get screened to become a client of the program.

Over the three years of the study, attorneys from the alliance represented 282 people. A follow-up analysis by the Vera Institute found that about 22% of the people represented through the program who would have otherwise been removed from the country instead saw case resolutions that allowed them to stay. That finding persisted across both the later portion of the Biden administration and the early months of Trump’s second term.

Some of the ways that an attorney helps a detainee’s case are obvious, like writing motions that argue core legal issues and how they apply to the facts of a particular detainees’ case. Others are more basic, like knowing what possibilities are on the table to resolve a case.

“There’s so many forms of relief that we as attorneys screen for that a judge is never going to inquire about, if they inquire at all,” Abrecht said. “There’s a lot of folks who are (representing themselves) who are eligible for relief and never know about it.”

Then there are the strategic pitfalls posed by the way immigration court works, like the fact that a person only gets one bond hearing.

“You’re detained, you want to get out of detention as quickly as possible, (so) perhaps the first instinct is to ask for a bond at your first hearing in court — not knowing, perhaps, that you don’t get a second chance to request a bond,” she said.

If someone’s family hasn’t had the time to request letters of support and evidence to support that bond request, Abrecht continued, that person is often immediately denied bond when they could have built a good case given more time. And there’s often only so much that an attorney taking up the case later can do to change that early decision.

Since the pilot program concluded in May 2025, the MIDA organizations have continued to take new clients, but through referrals instead of through master calendar hearings. That’s in part because people arrested in and around Chicago are no longer being sent to a predictable set of detention facilities. Instead, they’re being sent all over the country.

Abrecht said that some ways, the organizations running the alliance were in a strong position to face the deluge of arrests that came from Midway Blitz.

“We came out of the first three years of MIDA with a really strong network of organizations that were used to collaborating,” she said. “And so we had trained up a large cohort of detained removal defense attorneys who were ready to meet this moment.”

Nonetheless, the blitz brought chaos.

“The calls were astronomical,” she continued. “We absolutely were not able to represent everyone who called us for assistance.”

Weaver Boshart, who oversees the help desk at immigration court and legal aid hotline, said the number of people seeking help at court dipped to the single digits during some weeks at the height of the blitz. Advocates and attorneys are still trying to assuage the fears that have taken root during the last year, she noted, though foot traffic to the in-person help desk has largely rebounded.

When Guevara Olivas finished her orientation speech last week on the 15th floor, the room was packed and humming with conversation in multiple languages.

“I know that was a lot of information,” she said. “There’s a lot going on.”

It was just after 9 a.m. Waves of people kept moving through security, and Guevara Olivas asked each person if they had court that day. They’d nod yes, and she’d direct them to the screens and papers to find their names by the wall. Sometimes, people lingered to ask a few questions about what they or their loved one needed to know ahead of their hearing.

Others greeted attorneys in the waiting room. But most, as court workers emerged to call names and courtroom numbers, went to see the judge alone.