In Manhattan, which has perhaps the largest corps of lawyers in the world, hundreds of poor immigrants sitting in an immigration detention center are unable to turn to the help of lawyers in an attempt to avoid deportation.

Robert Katzman, a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, believes that this situation should remind us of the need to expand the scale of volunteer work in immigration courts, where defendants do not have the right to an attorney and where they are frequently provided with unqualified lawyers who are overloaded with cases.

But Judge Katzman, whose grandfather was an immigrant from Russia and whose father fled persecution by the Nazis, discovered that in the city historically considered a gateway for immigrants, only a few large law firms heed this urgent demand.

This is why Judge Katzman decided to take unusual measures: using his high position, he began his unique "crusade" to improve legal representation for immigrants.

What started two years ago with a speech to a city lawyer's association and gradually grew into morning study group meetings has now been transformed into symposiums held on Wednesdays at Fordham University School of Law, where well-known lawyers, judges, law professors and representatives from city government discuss the malfunctioning of the system for immigration proceedings, frequently until late into the night.

"Justice is not based on the level of an immigrant's income," said Katzman to the audience at his "working colloquium," which many believe to be an example that should be imitated in judicial circuits across the country. Research shows that immigrants who are represented in court by a lawyer are three to four times more likely to win their cases, but, overall, in the country only 35 percent of immigrants have lawyers.

The recession has led to reductions in personnel at large firms where lawyers do pro bono work, and immigration has always been the "stepdaughter" in their volunteer activities. And even though Judge Katzman's efforts have led to the creation of several new alliances between private law firms and non-profits (including the program Know Your Rights that was held at the Varick Street detention center), he believes that the legal needs of poor immigrants are far from being met.

The situation at the detention center on Varick Street, which is under the aegis of the law enforcement department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is a graphic illustration of this problem. This center, closed after 9/11 and reopened one year ago, holds undocumented immigrants detained during ICE raids who have not committed any crime and legal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and are waiting to be deported.

Managers of the Know Your Rights program say that they only have enough volunteer lawyers to consult with a dozen of the 250 people in the center. Another several hundred immigrants from New York are being held in New Jersey prisons, where you can count the number of free lawyers with the fingers on one hand.

But even paid lawyers are reluctant to take on immigrant cases, since many immigrants are frequently moved to detention centers in other states. And once a lawyer notifies the court that he is going to represent a specific immigrant, he cannot back out of the case, even if his client is 1,000 miles away.

The two judges assigned to the detention center on Varick Street are currently handling 500 to 800 cases each and 950 cases are awaiting consideration.

Judge Sarah Burr, one of the participants in the symposium, said that in the administrative building at Federal Plaza, 22 judges are working of 26,400 cases of immigrants who are not in detention facilities. Burr gave the example of the case of a student who was threatened with deportation because the government believed that his visa had expired. It turned out that this was not true, but the student was only able to prove this after four court sessions.

Participants in the symposium called on all those in attendance to double their efforts to interest members of organizations that unite law school graduates, their retired colleagues, and hundreds of lawyers working at various civil institutions in immigrant cases.

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