FY2026 NIJC Impact Report

Table of Contents

A Note From the Executive Director

Dear Friends:

As I step into the role of NIJC’s Executive Director, I am filled with gratitude:

Gratitude for the leaders who came before me, especially Mary Meg McCarthy. Before retiring this summer, Mary Meg led NIJC for nearly 30 years, transforming it from a local legal aid program to a national leader in legal services, litigation, and advocacy. She was also a mentor to me and many others in the immigrant rights community. I am honored to continue in her footsteps.

Gratitude for our clients and communities, who demonstrate courage and tenacity every day as they fight their cases in an overwhelmingly adversarial system, stand up for their neighbors against violence and lawlessness, or stand before the media and policymakers to share their stories.

Gratitude for the champions who stand by our side, including the tireless NIJC staff, our pro bono and community partners, and you. Thank you for doing your part to fight for justice, whether by volunteering, advocating, engaging in tough conversations, or donating.

Even in this moment when we face unprecedented challenges, we move the needle toward justice because of the strength of our community. As you will read in this report, NIJC and our partners continue to help our clients secure legal relief. We continue to get people released from detention, where they face deplorable conditions. We continue to educate the public on immigration issues, exposing human rights abuses and mobilizing action. And we continue to win victories in the courts, setting positive precedents.

Yet we have a long road ahead. In the past two years, the government has destroyed an already broken system by dismantling access to legal protections, denying the right to due process, terrorizing families who are just trying to do what’s right, and using illegal tactics to detain and deport our neighbors.

We face a critical moment. As we continue to defend our values and stand up for the rights of immigrants, we must also continue fighting for a brighter future. A future where we can reimagine immigrant rights and not just rebuild what has been destroyed, but replace it with something better.

Thank you for standing with us, in hope and solidarity, to make that vision a reality.

With gratitude,

Keren Zwick
Executive Director

NIJC’s Mission, Model, and Services

NIJC’s Mission

To establish and defend the legal rights of immigrants regardless of background and transform the immigration system to one that affords equal opportunity for all.

NIJC’s Unique Model

NIJC’s multi-pronged model combines four strategies to ensure access to justice for immigrants and their families.

• Direct legal services: Legal information, comprehensive legal screenings, brief services, and full legal representation
• Impact litigation: Collaborative litigation in the federal courts to challenge policies and practices that violate due process, U.S. immigration laws, and human rights
• Policy advocacy: Advocacy at national, state, and local levels and in partnership with coalitions to promote immigration policies that advance human rights
• Strategic communications: Public education through research, reports, presentations, and media engagement
  

NIJC’s Comprehensive Legal Services

NIJC’s work toward a fair and just immigration system is grounded in our direct services, which have grown in scale and complexity over NIJC’s more than 40 years of existence. Our legal teams have the depth and breadth of expertise to provide high-quality legal services in a comprehensive range of matters, including:

• Asylum and related protections, including under the Convention Against Torture
• Removal defense (representation in deportation hearings)
• Adjustment of status for asylees and refugees to obtain lawful permanent residence
• Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
• Detention release, through bond hearings and petitions for a writ of habeas corpus
• Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) for children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned
• Naturalization
• Legal status for survivors of crime, trafficking, and domestic violence (U visa, T visa, VAWA)
• Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
• Family petitions
  

Specialized Client-Centered Expertise

NIJC has deep experience serving asylum seekers; refugees; detained individuals; children; LGBTQ individuals; people with physical and mental disabilities; and survivors of trafficking, crime, and domestic violence. NIJC prioritizes trauma-informed legal representation by dedicated attorneys who have expertise in removal defense and other complex matters and experience working with people who are especially at risk of harm in the immigration system.

Diverse and Adaptable Service Models

Full representation, in which NIJC staff represent a client for the lifetime of their case, has long been central to NIJC’s model. NIJC also assists with immigration matters in other ways, for example, by conducting comprehensive legal screenings that advise immigrants of their options under the law and offering limited-scope services that provide brief, issue-specific legal counsel through consultations and/or assistance with filing applications and motions. Additionally, NIJC’s Know Your Rights presentations educate communities about their rights and obligations under the law and changes in immigration policy.

Meeting the Moment

Now more than ever, NIJC is focused on zealously and creatively advocating for our clients to prevent them from being detained, deported, and separated from their families and communities. Creativity has been particularly critical as immigration courts have become overtly hostile, such as through judges preventing people from seeking immigration relief, and new, exorbitant filing fees that prevent those without resources from accessing protection. NIJC has responded with diverse strategies, including:

• Expanding limited-scope legal services to reach more people
• Responding rapidly as long-term clients are scheduled for hearings or interviews with short notice
• Creating new materials and methods to inform existing clients and members of the immigrant community of the evolving risks that they face
• Advising against filing applications for relief given skyrocketing denial rates
• Filing habeas petitions to free immigrants from detention

A Year of Rapid Response

Over the past year, NIJC has continued fighting against the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Communities in Chicago and beyond demonstrated immense resilience and came together to oppose the violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations that resulted in the arrest and detention of thousands of our neighbors. NIJC’s multi-strategy model challenged the cruelty of unpredictable policies, exposed human rights violations, demanded accountability for illegal enforcement policies, and provided vital information and legal defense to the public.

In the Community

Castañon Nava:

Challenging illegal immigration arrests

When ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) went into the community to detain people, the warrantless arrests that they made were illegal both under longstanding statutory provisions and the Castañon Nava consent decree secured by NIJC in 2022. NIJC sued to enforce and extend the decree, winning an extension of the decree in May 2026. NIJC attorneys have used Castañon Nava to secure relief for more than 600 people who were arrested in the Midwest, including more than 200 people who were freed from detention. The decree also informed litigation strategies around the country, which severely limited ICE’s ability to engage in illegal, racially motivated arrests nationwide.

South Shore Raid Federal Tort Claims:

Seeking legal accountability for ICE

In September 2025, federal agents executed a military-style raid on an apartment complex in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, where they broke into units, rounded up families at gunpoint, and zip-tied children. Along with partners, NIJC represented 18 residents who were brutalized during the raid and submitted complaints under the Federal Tort Claims Act to pursue remedies for the harms they experienced.

Know Your Rights:

Educating communities on their legal rights

This year saw a whirlwind of changes to immigration policies and procedures, and community members, partner organizations, and policymakers regularly turned to NIJC for reliable information on the latest developments. From July 2025 to June 2026, NIJC’s Know Your Rights (KYR) community education presentations reached more than 5,500 people in a variety of locations.

In Detention

Legal services:

Building capacity to serve detained immigrants

In the past year, the number of detained immigrants has skyrocketed, at certain points climbing to more than 70,000 people. Given this reality, NIJC took numerous steps to uphold our longstanding commitment to serving detained individuals.

Through the Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance (MIDA), NIJC and partner organizations across Illinois increased legal representation for detained immigrants. NIJC and partners developed a centralized intake model based on referrals from the Family Support Network (FSN) hotline to effectively identify potential clients.

Together, MIDA organizations served nearly 300 clients in the last year. In addition, NIJC projects that historically served exclusively non-detained clients began providing detained removal defense. NIJC also began offering monthly KYR presentations at the Miami Correctional Facility—a maximum security prison that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began using to house immigrants—to ensure that detained individuals had timely access to information.

After Midway Blitz:

Exposing egregious ICE detention conditions

NIJC documented where immigrants were detained and exposed the inhumane conditions they face.

In December 2025, NIJC released a report titled “After the Blitz: What Our Chicago Neighbors Are Facing in ICE Detention,” detailing deadly conditions, such as overcrowding and medical neglect, as well as officials’ coercive tactics that pressure detained immigrants into giving up their due process rights and accept “voluntary departure.”

Moreover, NIJC has organized congressional visits to detention facilities in the face of new policies that attempt to suppress vital oversight.

Illinois Habeas Project:

Freeing people from detention

With an increasingly biased court, changes to expedited removal policies, and the elimination of access to bond, the growing population of people in ICE detention are especially vulnerable to rapid deportation.

In September 2025, NIJC established the Illinois Habeas Project, through which NIJC and pro bono partners file habeas corpus petitions in federal court to secure the release of detained immigrants.

As of June 2026, the habeas project had filed 125 cases, prevailing in 86% of decisions and winning positive outcomes on behalf of nearly 100 people, including unaccompanied children. With a multi-strategy model and nationwide pro bono network, NIJC is uniquely equipped to innovate strategies combining impact litigation and legal services to limit the removal of immigrants from their families and communities.

At the Courthouse

Immigration Court Helpdesk:

Providing critical information to unrepresented immigrants

Prohibitively expensive application fees, new tactics that make it impossible for immigrants to seek relief even when they qualify for it, and eleventh-hour changes to court dockets have added deliberate chaos and cruelty to an immigration court system that was already difficult to navigate. Through NIJC’s Immigration Court Helpdesks (ICH) at the Chicago and Indiana immigration courts, attorneys provide reliable legal information, assistance, and referrals at no cost to unrepresented individuals. This resource is often immigrants’ only chance to access free legal services and speak with an attorney, which can mean the difference between safety and deportation. The ICH is also essential to identifying trends on the ground: NIJC’s ICH team was among the first to sound the alarm on “mega-master hearings,” in which unrepresented people are required to appear en masse and pressured into waiving their due process rights. NIJC quickly produced and distributed Know Your Rights materials. Similarly, the ICH identified that the government was detaining and dismissing the cases of people who showed up at their scheduled hearings, which enabled NIJC’s litigation team to file a legal challenge.

BIA Lawsuit:

Defending immigrants’ access to appellate review

In February 2026, NIJC filed a lawsuit to block a new federal rule that would have eliminated meaningful appellate review before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). NIJC and partners sought emergency relief, arguing that the rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the U.S. Constitution because it deprives noncitizens of a meaningful appellate process. The court vacated the rule minutes before it was set to take effect in March. As the government is expected to reissue the rule, NIJC is ready to resist any attack on due process and immigrants’ right to a fair day in court.

NIJC’s Commitment to Immigrant Children

Immigrant children — including those who enter the United States as unaccompanied children — have limited access to attorneys but face government prosecutors who advocate for their deportation.

For many years, the federal government has funded NIJC and similar organizations to provide legal information and representation to unaccompanied children. But in early 2025, the government sought to terminate this program, prompting NIJC and others to sue to keep the program in place. This forced the government to maintain the program, but the government did not renew the contract with existing service providers, which ended on July 31, 2026. NIJC planned for this challenge throughout the past year and remains committed to advancing access to counsel for immigrant children.

Thanks to gap funding and ongoing fundraising, NIJC will continue to represent more than 300 unaccompanied children with open cases, including more than 100 who were suddenly scheduled for asylum interviews and/or removal hearings. NIJC will also continue to identify children and families who need legal services, including through a new Illinois school-based helpdesk program.

Who We Served

NIJC’s Impact by the Numbers

People served

Cases

Legal Relief / Employment Authorization Document

Detention Release

Success Rates

How Our Work Has Changed

The number of people served is lower compared to last year (10,100 individuals) due in large part to the increasing complexity of cases, requiring more hours per case and decreasing NIJC’s capacity to accept new cases. This reduction is also due to government policies that have greatly reduced the number of newly arrived migrants, particularly unaccompanied children. Additionally, NIJC’s strategies have shifted under this administration, which continues to target people with pending applications for legal status even if they are eligible for relief. Strategies may include advising clients not to file applications or delaying adjudication of applications to prevent deportation. NIJC is committed to zealously advocating for immigrant communities and is expanding our legal services staff to reach as many people as possible.

Success rates: NIJC measures success at the completion of a case, including when all appeals have been exhausted. Though NIJC’s success rates remain high, many more cases have required appeals, first to the BIA and then potentially to a federal court. Because the opportunity to succeed on appeal is much lower than the opportunity to prevail before an immigration judge, success rates may fall as more cases reach their final resolution. Despite these challenges, NIJC strives to continue to achieve high success rates for cases where clients choose to pursue applications for legal relief.

Community Partnerships

NIJC is part of strong ecosystems of organizations advancing immigrant justice locally, regionally, and nationally. Our network includes legal aid and civil rights organizations, social service agencies, hospitals, domestic violence shelters, schools, judges, and government officials. Below are examples of how NIJC works collaboratively to strengthen the immigrant justice movement.

Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance (MIDA)

NIJC is one of the co-founders of Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance (MIDA), a collaborative established in 2022 to fight the detention-to-deportation pipeline. Other founding organizations are the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender, The Immigration Project, and The Resurrection Project. Last year, in response to the skyrocketing need for detained services, MIDA added three partners: Children’s Legal Center, Erie Neighborhood House, and the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project.

In addition to providing legal services, NIJC leverages our decades of expertise in detained practice to provide training and capacity-building support for partner organizations. NIJC provides both onboarding and ongoing training in detained removal defense, hosts office hours to advise advocates at partner organizations on complex legal matters, and offers co-counseling and mentoring on cases. NIJC also manages a MIDA resource library. From 2022 to 2025, with NIJC’s expertise and training, MIDA clients were six times more likely to be granted relief than unrepresented immigrants and almost twice as likely as those with non-MIDA counsel (Vera, 2026).

Building the capacity of the legal ecosystem

NIJC’s legal experts have provided training and mentorship to partner organizations and pro bono attorneys for decades. As the need for legal services has grown over the past few years, NIJC has also expanded our capacity-building offerings. Last year, NIJC provided dozens of trainings on immigration law and practice. NIJC disseminates technical knowledge on emerging issues, such as bond and prolonged detention, while developing network capacity to serve immigrants at scale. In the next year, NIJC plans to enhance and streamline these resources through the creation of NIJC’s Advocate Training Center, a hub that will make NIJC’s trainings and materials widely available to legal advocates.

Collaborating on system-level work:
Litigation and policy

NIJC partners with other immigrant rights organizations on our policy and federal court litigation. NIJC frequently represents other organizations who serve as plaintiffs in various pieces of litigation and serves as co-counsel with partner organizations. NIJC also partners with immigrant and civil rights organizations on national, state, and local policy initiatives. Partner organizations include but are not limited to ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, American Immigration Council, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Democracy Forward, Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, Human Rights First, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), National Immigration Law Center, Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD), and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.

In image above NIJC Policy Director Azadeh Erfani poses with community partners at a shadow hearing, ‘Deputized for Disaster’, held by U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez and U.S. Representative Sylvia Garcia about the
Trump administration’s use of local law enforcement to increase deportation operations.

Pro Bono Community

Over the past year, NIJC’s pro bono network rose to meet the moment through legal representation; clinics to help clients apply for status and employment authorization; impact litigation; and legal research to expand access to justice for immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.

By the Numbers:

• More than 61,000 hours donated by more than 2,500 legal volunteers
• 136 law firm and corporate partners in our pro bono community
• Almost 2,500 open cases and over 100 victories for clients represented by pro bono attorneys

Numbers do not tell the full story. As immigrants face an increasingly hostile legal landscape, pro bono volunteers are stepping up to navigate the new and complex challenges their clients face.

This year, pro bono attorneys supported clients by filing habeas petitions to free wrongfully detained immigrants, submitting FOIA requests for people whose refugee status the administration had placed under scrutiny, and representing asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors.

NIJC is grateful to our entire pro bono network for their resilience, adaptiveness, and commitment to defending due process for immigrant communities.

Financial Summary

Fiscal Year 2025 (July 2024 – June 2025)

Financial Narrative

NIJC became an independent 501(c)(3) organization in April 2024. FY 2025 was NIJC’s first full fiscal year and the latest year for which audited financial statements are available. NIJC anticipates releasing our FY 2026 audit in winter 2027.

NIJC experienced financial uncertainty during FY 2025, including federal funding termination; serious threats of retaliation to institutions that supported immigrant rights; and the investments required in NIJC’s first year as an independent organization. Fortunately, the reinstatement of some federal funding through litigation, multi-year grants from philanthropic partners, ongoing support from state and local governments, and unprecedented donations from our supporters enabled NIJC to close the year in a strong financial position. This allowed NIJC to expand our work during a time when the need for legal services is at an all-time high. NIJC is grateful to supporters like you who made this possible.

NIJC’s Staff at Work

Ways to Help

Contact NIJC

Learn more about urgent needs. Email NIJC.