in the USA, the average cost of an attorney is $300 per hour. there are legal aid nonprofits that rely almost entirely on funding from the government - such as immigrant legal aid organizations.
we only have the right to an attorney when we are charged with a crime and are determined to be unable to afford attorneys fees on our own. that is it.
so what sense does it make to start a nonprofit specifically for providing legal representation to immigrants, that is entirely dependent on government funding to operate?
i guess no one could have predicted that the Trump Administration would cut funding to immigrant legal aid nonprofits. so now we have immigrant legal aid organizations that use whatever funding they have left to teach know your rights workshops to children under 5 years old.
we are expected to see this as normal. as if, naturally, no funding means children must represent themselves in court because legal aid orgs had no choice but to fire all their lawyers while keeping only their executives and less expensive paralegals on their payrolls. CNN has done multiple sob stories on this heartbreaking situation in which their only sources are presidents and executive directors of these immigration legal aid nonprofits.
btw, this is a criticism of the nonprofit industrial complex and the legal professions and the mainstream corporate news media and the people who mindlessly accept this as normal.
trump bad, but he is not bad by himself. we know this.
thank you, comrades, for allowing me to rant.
/end rant
The bourgeois are not human.
additionally, how many of you have tried getting legal services at any point over the past several years? there aren’t any. one - they’re impossible to find without a personal referral, as in, being rich and well connected. the only poor people who can offer a referral for a lawyer are those who have charged with a crime. in many states (like mine), public defenders offices are not funded. even when there is legislation that funds public defenders, it requires those same legislators to allocate those funds and guess what? they won’t. they would rather waste taxpayer funds than allow it to pay for anything that might help us survive their police state.
but aside from criminal cases, there are huge swaths of the country where legal representation is just unattainable if you are not connected. say you saved up thousands for a lawyer - doesn’t matter. they won’t call you back. they don’t have to. they have the right to choose their clients and they don’t represent anyone who they don’t already know - whether it’s housing or consumer or disability or labor, no matter how loudly our comrades like to shout “sue them! this is a slam dunk!” it’s not because lawyers don’t want our business. even if it looks like a “slam dunk” to us, what we don’t realize is that in most cases, we lack standing, or the “damages” are not considered real by the courts. our lives have no value unless our future capacity to make a lot of money was ruined. if we’re low wage earners or disabled or elderly or children? our lives, our futures, and our quality of life is of no value to the courts in many cases.
we tend to hyperfocus on criminal legal issues as marxists - and while the criminal legal system is absolutely abhorrent, so is the legal system in its entirety. imagine writing the law so that it is incomprehensible to anyone without a law degree, then charging $300+ per hour for help navigating that system, then shaming people for attempting to be their own lawyer because they have no other options.
Damn, alright next time around we are literally going to run over porkies and there servants/bootlickers with literal tanks
What. The. Fuck.
