The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center cut its staffing from about 130 to 54 this week following a loss of federal funding amid the largest deportation effort is U.S. history.
MIRC, which counts U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Grand Rapids, as a former employee, cited the toughened immigration policies enforced by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“On April 10th, the Trump administration ended funding for our Helpdesk program in immigration court, and previously ended funding for legal services for unaccompanied children,” according to a MIRC statement posted to X on Monday.
“Due to this intolerable financial pressure, MIRC was forced to provide lay off notices to 72 staff located in offices across the state. MIRC’s small Helpdesk team will continue for now,” the statement read. “49 staff remain to continue MIRC’s other services in our five offices.”
Those offices in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Ypsilanti are now scrambling to continue services for about 800 children currently involved in immigration proceedings, according to The Detroit News.
MIRC “will be unable to accept new children’s cases for the foreseeable future without additional resources,” the nonprofit reports.
The terminated contracts through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cover attorneys for migrant children who entered the country illegally without a parent, and funded MIRC’s Immigration Court Helpdesk Program in Detroit federal court, which will continue with a smaller staff of five.
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MIRC is a federal subcontractor for Acacia Center for Justice, which was informed in March DHHS was terminating virtually all legal work through its network of providers across the country.
The terminated contracts in Michigan cuts $12 million from MIRC’s budget that covered 80% of the center’s 130 staff, according to The News.
The federal funding is in addition to $1 million allocated by Democrats in the Michigan Legislature last year to fund legal services for illegal immigrants that also flows to MIRC.
About 10,000 immigrants have utilized MIRC’s Helpdesk since that program was launched in late 2021, while the program for unaccompanied minors has served nearly 1,700 since 2017, MLive reports.
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“Overall, with the loss of the federal funding for both of these programs, it’s a major setback for due process and access to legal services for immigrants in Michigan,” MIRC spokeswoman Christine Sauve told Michigan Public.
The development comes at a time when border crossings are at an all-time low, and arrests of illegal immigrants in Michigan are up significantly from the past.
“March saw the lowest number of apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol along the Southwest Border in history,” John Morris, U.S. Border Patrol’s Detroit Sector chief, recently posted to X. “Concurrently, the Detroit Sector arrested the most illegal aliens in recent memory. America: Safer every day.”
The post linked to news release detailing the numbers for March: “the Border Patrol data shows that around 7,180 southwest border crossings were recorded, a dramatic drop compared to the monthly average of 155,000 from the previous four years.
“Daily southwest border apprehensions have also fallen to around 230 per day – a 95% drop from the previous administration’s average daily encounters of 5,100 per day,” the release read.
Michael Banks, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, noted on a post to X that the 230 daily border apprehensions in March is “a number our country has never seen before.”
Banks’ post was accompanied by a promotional USBP video that features Trump’s remarks during his recent joint address to Congress.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border,’” Trump said. “But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
In Michigan, the crackdown is taking a lot of bad hombres off the streets.
During just the first week of April, social media posts from Morris highlighted apprehensions of Tren de Aragua gang members, a Mexican national with multiple drunken driving offenses in recent months, previously deported criminals, a man wanted for murder in El Salvador, and another wanted for murder in Venezuela, among others.
In early March, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan announced prosecutors have charged 46 illegal immigrants with a range of crimes since the new year, from drug trafficking to illegal firearms possession to child pornography offenses.
The cases involved individuals from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela who entered the country illegally with prior convictions for human smuggling, drug trafficking, drunken driving, assault, and theft.
“These cases represent a fraction of the criminal aliens we and our federal partners arrest every day across the Detroit Sector that’s making this country safer than it was just a few short months ago,” Morris said in a statement.
The arrests continue as lawmakers in Lansing butt heads over immigration policy in the Great Lakes State. Legislation introduced by Democrats to provide driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants recently failed to clear the House when all Republicans and six Democrats opposed the measure, according to the Detroit Free Press.
A Republican majority in the lower chamber have vowed to restrict state funding to local governments that provide sanctuary to illegal immigrants, while Democrats who control the upper chamber have worked to block legislation introduced by Republicans to align the state’s policies on immigration with federal immigration enforcement efforts.