The Defending Immigrants Partnership (DIP) is an unprecedented collaboration between the Immigrant Defense Project, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center — the country’s foremost immigration advocacy and defense organizations with expertise in the immigration consequences of crime and national, regional, and local indigent defense organizations.
The mission of DIP, the only national collaborative devoted to fostering changed perceptions and effective practices within the criminal justice system, is to ensure high-quality legal representation for indigent immigrant clients in criminal and civil matters.
Since 2002, DIP has provided defenders the means to make systemic improvements in their representation of noncitizen clients. DIP has
- trained thousands of indigent defenders on criminal defense of immigrants;
- created user-friendly written materials available on-line;
- created various office models or “protocols” for how defender offices with limited resources can set up structures so that they can provide this advice;
- trained and mentored attorneys to serve as in-house immigration experts at defender organizations across the country;
- written and distributed timely practice advisories on key cases;
- analyzed and advised on the immigration consequences of thousands of individual criminal cases;
- and most recently, educated the criminal defense community about the meaning of and responsibilities of Padilla.