The federally-funded Legal Services Corporation (LSC) announced today that it was fining and defunding Farmworkers Legal Services of North Carolina over violations of federal law associated with a Mexican trip taken earlier this year by its lawyers. The lawyers illegally provided legal representation to non-citizens not present in the U.S. and filed lawsuits against North Carolina farmers on behalf of ineligible aliens living in Mexico.
Farmworkers Legal Services of North Carolina, an affiliate of Legal Services of North Carolina, is being fined $17,050 (the amount associated with the illegal trip) and will cease to receive Legal Services Corporation funding when its funding expires on January 1, 1999.
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a watchdog group for abuses in the legal services program, had provided information on the Mexican trip to the House Appropriations Subcommittee in February 1998. The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY-5), and a North Carolina member of the subcommittee, Rep. Charles Taylor (R-N.C.-11), called for an investigation. NLPC provided Congress and the LSC with a candidly-shot videotape showing the North Carolina lawyers in gatherings in Mexico where they provided legal assistance to Mexican citizens and recruited Mexicans to file lawsuits against North Carolina farmers.
NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm, stated: “While legal services was claiming it lacked funds to provide for the legal needs of North Carolina’s poor, they were using $17,000 in taxpayers funds to travel to Mexico to illegally recruit non-citizens to sue North Carolina farmers.”
Boehm noted that the National Legal and Policy Center sent a certified
letter to Mr. J. Donald Cowan, chairman of Legal Services of North Carolina,
in August asking the cases filed on behalf of the ineligible non-citizens
be dropped. Boehm also informed Mr. Cowan that Legal Services of
North Carolina had filed false and incomplete case disclosure information
to the Legal Services Corporation, having failed to list “Mexico” as part
of a plaintiff’s address and falsely including a Kentucky zip code for
a client living in Mexico. Mr. Cowan did not respond to the letter.
NLPC Chairman Boehm concluded “Once again, legal services activist
lawyers have shown their true colors. As with hundreds of recent
documented abuses, this case shows that legal services lawyers would rather
pursue their own ideological agenda than help the poor. The farmers
of North Carolina should not have their hard-earned tax dollars going to
the state and federal government finance a militantly anti-farmer group
like Legal Services of North Carolina.”
NLPC has become the leading watchdog organization exposing abuses with the federal legal services program. NLPC promotes ethics and accountability in government through distribution of the “Code of Ethics for Government Service,” and through research, education and legal action.