Law students at the University of Wyoming (UW), a public institution, offered a free clinic earlier this month at the Laramie County Library to help illegal immigrants obtain citizenship.

The university’s Civil Legal Services Clinic (CLSC) led the program.

The director of CLSC, Danielle Cover, has received two university teaching awards for her progressivism — the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award: Inspirational Faculty in 2017 and the Shepard Symposium on Social Justice Faculty Award in 2018. Under Cover’s leadership, the CLSC expanded its pro bono work using grants from the nonprofit, Equal Justice Wyoming Foundation (EJWF).

The EJWF is part of Equal Justice Wyoming (EJW), formerly the Wyoming Center for Legal Aid, a state-funded civil legal services program for low-income clients. The Wyoming Supreme Court created EJW in 2011. EJW and its grant-issuing arm, EJWF, are funded by revenues from increased court-filing fees, increased pro hac vice fees paid by out-of-state attorneys, Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) funds, and Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) funds.

CLSC only received one EJW grant in 2019 for nearly $38,300, likely due to the EJW’s self-reported years-long struggle to raise sufficient revenue for grants. However, the EJWF also issued over $155,000 in grants to the university for sponsored legal services programming from 2016 to 2021 according to tax filings. For the 2023-24 grant cycle, EJWF and EJW have issued up to $1.8 million in grants.

Along with CLSC, the UW College of Law Estate Planning Practicum participated, as well as two outside law firms: Traveling Immigration Attorney and Hirst-Applegate Immigrant Hope.

Traveling Immigration Attorney is run by Nimsy Garcia, a UW College of Law alumna whose parents were illegal immigrants. The other firm, Hirst-Applegate, first began offering immigration law services last fall, well over a year into the ongoing border crisis.

Law student Ana Rodriguez came up with the idea to host the immigration clinic. Rodriguez told Wyoming Public Media that the current justice system doesn’t work for all, namely minorities.

“Marginalized groups and people of color: the system isn’t built for them. The system is built to oppress and marginalize them further and keep them out,” said Rodriguez. “And so I think that’s a huge problem all throughout the country, but especially in Wyoming, with the lack of attorneys and the lack of resources.”

Rodriguez worked as an immigration paralegal in Colorado in 2021, and previously volunteered as an American Immigration Council translator for detained illegal immigrants, and a staffer for Casa de Paz Colorado, a halfway house for illegal immigrants leaving the Aurora, Colorado detention center.  

The American Immigration Council is a nonprofit that advocates for granting automatic legal status to illegal immigrants; the nonprofit has worked closely with the Southern Poverty Law Center and receives funding from major leftist dark money organizations such as George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society and the Ford Foundation. Casa de Paz Colorado is affiliated with the leftist immigration group, Detention Watch Network, which advocates for abolishing all immigration detention.

According to Migration Policy Institute data, collected every 10 years, Wyoming’s foreign-born immigrant population doubled from 1.7% in 1990 to 3.4% in 2021.  

Wyoming doesn’t have an immigration court. Denver, Colorado’s immigration court handles Wyoming immigration cases. There are 70 immigration courts across the remaining 28 states.

The CLSC is looking to hold another clinic for illegal immigrants in late fall near an ICE Detention Center located in Casper, Wyoming. There were over 183,500 encounters last month; a decline from last July and July 2021, but over four times as many as July 2020. 

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its southwest border encounters data on Friday. Since President Joe Biden took office, there have been over 5.8 million illegal immigrant encounters.

Emergency room doctors and pediatricians are pleading for help with a flood of children and teenagers showing up at emergency rooms due to mental health issues.

A surge of mental health emergencies among children has overwhelmed emergency rooms, according to a joint paper released Wednesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and Emergency Nurses Association (ENA).

The children showing up in crisis are often suffering from emergencies related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts or attempts, the groups said.

“The ER has become a de facto referral center for all of these problems, and there’s too many of them for the emergency department to manage,” said lead author Dr. Mohsen Saidinejad, who directs pediatric emergency medicine at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Saidinejad is also a member of the AAP and ACEP committees on pediatric emergency medicine.

“That is not who we are as ER physicians. We are not mental health professionals. We cannot provide definitive care,” Saidinejad said.

About half a million children with mental or behavioral health problems show up at emergency rooms each year, according to the joint paper. That number was already rising before the pandemic, but the pandemic exacerbated the crisis, the physician groups said.

One issue emergency rooms encounter is that pediatric mental health crises tend to be very complex and require much longer hospital stays. The average pediatric mental health stay is 17 hours compared to an average five hours for all emergency room stays, according to the paper.

The pediatric mental emergency visits also drain “resources that would have been needed to run the normal medical operations of the ER, so that increases of length of stay for the other patients as well,” Saidinejad said.

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Another issue is that children who arrive at emergency rooms in crisis are less likely to get the follow-up care they need if they only go to an emergency room rather than a psychiatric crisis center or community mental health center, according to Saidinejad.

The physician groups are calling for several measures to address the crisis.

One measure is community-based teams that could respond to children in crisis at school, in doctors’ offices, and even at their homes. Another measure is placing pediatric mental health professionals in emergency departments. Another aid the groups suggested is supporting emergency department staff with information about high-risk children, such as abuse victims and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The country’s mental health system needs to be expanded as well, the paper’s authors said.

There is only one mental health professional for every 124,000 children, and as many as 55% of all counties do not have even one psychiatric professional, Saidinejad said.

Telehealth for children’s mental health could also help in treating children before they land in the emergency room, the authors said.

“We in the ER are basically a safety net. We can’t say no to anything. We have to accept whatever comes our way. And I think that is why everybody is referring these children to the ER,” Saidinejad said.