For nearly three decades, the National Immigration Project has provided legal support, training, and technical assistance to noncitizens, legal advocates, community groups, and families responding to immigration enforcement actions. In addition to being a leading source of cutting-edge legal strategies, the National Immigration Project develops community resource materials to build greater awareness about draconian enforcement actions and the toll exacted upon families.

A noncitizen in the criminal justice system faces permanent banishment from the U.S. and separation from her or his family. Criminal defense counsel may be unaware or uninformed about the immigration consequences of criminal conviction. The National Immigration Project has been at the forefront of the national effort to help criminal defense lawyers understand the law and protect their noncitizen clients.

We provide support, referrals, and technical assistance to advocates, community organizations, and families on deportation defense and custody issues. We also provide information and referrals to families and detained immigrants navigating the detention system. These services are available free of charge to practitioners everywhere. Since it began tracking inquiries in 2003, the National Immigration Project has provided more than five thousand instances of direct technical assistance to attorneys in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

For more than twenty years, the National Immigration Project has played a leading role in expanding legal rights for noncitizens under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and other related legislation, providing legal support to advocates and attorneys around the U.S. who are working with undocumented victims of abuse and other crimes. NIPNLG works to develop policies and practices within the federal government that support the rights of undocumented crime victims.

Immigrant victims fear that reporting violent crime and labor violations to law enforcement and working with the criminal justice system will expose them to deportation.

Most recently, NIPNLG identified a need for coordinated strategies and advocacies on behalf of immigrant victims of workplace crimes. Such crimes may include sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct in the workplace; as well as labor-related and economic crimes perpetrated by employers.

A noncitizen victim of a crime faces unique barriers to justice. Immigrant victims fear that reporting violent crime and labor violations to law enforcement and working with the criminal justice system will expose them to deportation. Similarly, these victims fear that access to traditional victim support systems may result in permanent banishment from the U.S. and separation from their children and families. Fortunately, noncitizen survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, workplace crimes, trafficking, and other crimes may attain legal status without having to rely on the support or testimony of their abusers.

Director of Legal Advocacy Ellen Kemp is the primary contact for technical assistance and educational materials for the Project’s attorney members, legal workers, advocates, law students, detainees, and the public regarding immigration options for noncitizen survivors of crimes, including U visas for survivors of intimate partner violence and workplace crimes.

The National Immigration Project opposes immigration enforcement that limits the democratic participation of noncitizens in civil society. We work to ensure that noncitizens have the right to free political expression and participation in the free marketplace of ideas. We help create tools for noncitizens to express their views and work with advocates to create response plans for noncitizens who engage in civil disobedience direct actions for important social causes.

We work to ensure that noncitizens have the right to free political expression...We help create tools for noncitizens to express their views.

From at least the beginning of the last century and through the current era, immigrants have been targeted in this country for their political views and activities. Examples of this include the Palmer raids, in which immigrant union organizers were the main targets of the union-busting tactics of the government and were the most vulnerable due to the potential for deportation; the McCarthy era when immigrant communists and other immigrant political activists became the most vulnerable victims of the "Red scare" hysteria; and from the early 1980s to the present when Palestinian activists and other political and religious activists, Sikh political activists, and other immigrants have been targeted by the government based on what groups they support.

The Project works to combat these unjust government actions through coalition building, providing legal analysis and strategies, organizing politically, and providing legislative analysis of harmful legislative provisions.