There’s a reason the Left didn’t want to lose this election. They knew their secrets would come out.
Now a bombshell investigation exposes one Biden-era cover-up that is shattering Democrats.
The federal government pours tens of millions of dollars each year into a legal assistance program for illegal immigrants facing deportation hearings — despite its own studies showing the program has little to no impact on case outcomes.
Making matters worse, the Legal Orientation Program (LOP) actually increases costs, as migrants who participated remained in custody for up to seven additional weeks, according to a 2021 study. The combined financial drain reached nearly $128 million per year.
The Biden administration deliberately “hid” these findings from Congress and the public while simultaneously pushing for more taxpayer funding for the program, according to a memo from the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency overseeing immigration courts.
“EOIR continued to seek additional funding for legal orientation programs and repeatedly failed to disclose to [the Department of Justice] or to Congress that it knew that the general LOP was not an effective or economical program,” wrote Sirce E. Owen, who took over the agency when President Trump took office.
She condemned the administration’s decision to conceal the study, saying it “was inappropriate and significantly undermined EOIR’s credibility and integrity.”
The explosive memo has largely flown under the radar amid the flurry of early Trump administration moves, but a senior Justice Department official suggested that the LOP’s $28 million budget should be an obvious target for Congress or Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
A Program That Fails to Deliver
The Legal Orientation Program is one of several government-funded initiatives designed to assist illegal immigrants in deportation proceedings. It pays nongovernmental organizations to inform migrants about their legal rights, potential defense options, and how to request release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
Yet, data reveals that the program has no meaningful effect on case outcomes.
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A 2018 study found that 76% of LOP participants were ordered deported — nearly identical to the 78% deportation rate for those who did not receive the program’s assistance. Likewise, about 10% of LOP participants either won their cases or had them closed without a deportation order, compared to 9% of those who didn’t take part.
The 2021 study reaffirmed these findings and revealed another troubling trend: LOP participants were detained at higher rates and for significantly longer periods than those who bypassed the program.
In 2017, migrants who went through the LOP while in detention spent an average of 155 days in custody, compared to 104 days for those who did not. Even those who won release through the program remained detained for an average of 89 days, while non-participants spent only 55 days in custody.
“If this was not making any difference in the outcome and only making cases take longer, why did they continue to advocate on behalf of the program when it was interfering with the publicly declared backlog and making it longer?” asked Matthew O’Brien, a former immigration judge now with the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
A Cash Pipeline for Activist Groups?
O’Brien argued that the Biden administration’s ties to immigration advocacy groups played a significant role in the push to keep the LOP funded.
“It seems pretty clear based on this memo is what was going on is they were funneling all this money into these programs to screw the taxpayer,” he said.
Neither the Justice Department nor the American Immigration Council, a staunch defender of the LOP, responded to inquiries from The Washington Times. The Acacia Center for Justice, a key player in the program, pointed to a paragraph in the 2021 study suggesting that further analysis would be needed to establish definitive causal factors.
“EOIR would need to conduct additional, rigorous analysis to draw definitive conclusions regarding any potential causal factors,” the study noted.
A Bottleneck in the Deportation System
While the Department of Homeland Security typically receives the most attention in immigration enforcement, experts warn that the immigration court system is an even greater bottleneck in deportations.
As of last month, EOIR had a staggering backlog of 4 million pending cases. In 2024 alone, it added 1.8 million cases while managing to complete just 700,000.
The Trump administration previously attempted to scrap the LOP in 2018, with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions moving to eliminate the program — only to backtrack under pressure from Congress and immigration advocacy groups.
Now, with the new memo surfacing, some believe another attempt to end the program is imminent.
“The only reason that I can think of to release this memo now is they want to abrogate the contracts they have with legal services providers,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge with the Center for Immigration Studies.
With immigration still a defining issue in Washington, the fate of the LOP may soon be back in the spotlight — especially as the Trump administration looks to overhaul a broken system weighed down by bureaucratic waste and activist-driven spending.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
