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Executive Summary At a time when politics, financial considerations, and a push for expediency put pressure on the US immigration system, it can be difficult to have faith in the adjudicatory process. Case resolution quotas, directives that constrain courts' ability to render justice in individual cases, and executive decisions that contract immigration judges' discretion contribute to an immigration system that looks less and less like judicial adjudication of some of the highest-stakes cases in our legal system and more like a ministerial claims-processing scheme. A ray of hope exists, however, in the proliferation of public defender–style systems that offer universal representation to those facing deportation. This essay describes the genesis and expansion of the universal representation movement — a project based on the idea that indigent individuals should be entitled to counsel regardless of the apparent merits or political palatability of their case. It describes the benefits of such a program to the immigration adjudication system writ large. Beyond the oft-cited increase in success rates for individuals represented and the benefits to the communities in which such programs are located, universal representation promotes the integrity of the court system and strengthens an adjudicatory procedure that, for too long, has functioned primarily to expeditiously churn through cases. Finally, looking forward, it considers some of the challenges this movement faces as it grows and it identifies areas for further expansion.

In the waning days of the Obama Administration, with Trump's promised immigration crackdown looming, over one hundred advocacy organizations joined forces to urge President Obama to permanently protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation by pardoning their breaches of civil immigration law. That pardon never materialized and, as expected, the Trump enforcement regime is sowing terror and devastation in immigrant communities nationwide. While it seems unfathomable that the current president would use his pardon power to mitigate even the most extreme applications of our nation's immigration laws, there is unfortunately no indication that the harshest aspects of the immigration laws are likely to be revised by the current political branches. Accordingly, future presidents will likely once again face the questions of how they may use prosecutorial discretion generally, and the pardon power specifically, to address the human toll of such laws. Since the founding, the pardon power has been used primarily to forgive individual criminal convictions. Thus the broad civil immigration pardon, which Obama declined to issue, would have raised novel questions regarding the appropriate boundaries the presidential pardon power. Resolution of those previously unexplored questions is necessary to help future presidents determine whether their pardon power can serve as a safety valve to alleviating the disproportionate penalties that our immigration laws have imposed on longtime members of our communities.This article explores the novel concept of a civil immigration pardon. Specifically, it closely examines the language and drafting history of the Pardon Clause, exhaustively reviews early and modern pardon practice and jurisprudence, and considers whether a president could, consistent with the Constitution, use that power to protect some of the largest categories of noncitizens currently at risk of deportation. Ultimately, it argues that that the president possesses the constitutional authority to categorically pardon broad classes of immigrants for civil violations of the immigration laws and to thereby provide durable and permanent protections against deportation. As millions of noncitizens and their families face a historically unprecedented wave of deportations and as traditional mechanisms for policymaking continue to fail, the immigration pardon offers an important tool for future presidents to forgive the civil offenses that result in some of the most unforgiving penalties in our nation's justice system.