The resource limitations of legal nonprofit organizations force staff attorneys to make difficult choices about whom to serve. Nowhere are the consequences of lawyers’ case selection decisions starker than in the immigration context, where individuals face deportation if unable to successfully advocate for themselves before legal authorities. Based on three years of qualitative research within legal services organizations in Los Angeles, this Note describes and contextualizes immigration lawyers’ case-selection approach, with a focus on attorneys’ role as policy actors within the immigrant justice movement.

In this Note, I focus on attorneys’ selection of U visa clients. The U visa provides temporary immigration status and other benefits to noncitizens who endure violent crimes and subsequently cooperate with police investigations and prosecutions. People of all gender identities may qualify, and various crimes may confer eligibility. Yet I found that intra- and extra-organizational factors encourage attorneys to prioritize female domestic violence victims as U visa clients over others. While these cases warrant U visa protection, prioritizing this population effectively blocks other deserving immigrants from such protection and perpetuates a dangerous narrative around the mythologized perfect immigrant.

I also found that, although lawyers’ case-selection approach excluded potentially viable U visa candidates in the short term, their decisions were part of a deliberate strategy of U visa policy protection. Thus, my findings demonstrate nonprofit lawyers’ role as parastate actors: individuals who technically work outside of the state but whose work is intertwined with it. One potential solution is for nonprofit lawyers to partner with private sector attorneys, encouraging the latter to take on cases less likely to prevail under current jurisprudence; if successful, such a strategy could open up these cases, which nonprofit attorneys cannot accept now due to practical limitations, to nonprofit attorneys in the future. In a hypothetical world with immigration advocates taking on more U visa cases outside the female domestic violence context, the law might move to be more accepting of such cases.

In this Note, I present my empirical study of U visa case selection in legal nonprofits and its implications for immigration lawyering around the U visa and other relief opportunities for noncitizens.