Kentucky center providing legal aid to immigrants, advocacy for the poor is closing
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- Kentucky Equal Justice Center will close in July 2025 after nearly 50 years.
- Funding losses and political challenges drove the nonprofit's decision to shut down.
- The group is seeking lawyers to assume several hundred open immigration cases.
A Lexington-based nonprofit that provided advocacy and legal support for low-income Kentuckians and ran a clinic specializing in immigration law is shutting down after nearly 50 years.
The Kentucky Equal Justice Center announced on Tuesday that it will close at the end of July. The center operates the Maxwell Street Legal Clinic, which will also cease operations.
“KEJC is working to wind down its operations responsibly and ensure that clients and partner organizations experience as little disruption as possible,” a news release stated.
“This decision was not made lightly,” executive director Shay Hutchinson said in the release. “It reflects the challenging funding landscape facing nonprofit legal advocacy organizations nationwide, not the strength or significance of our mission.”
In January, the center said it was temporarily pausing its operations because of uncertainty over funding in the wake of executive orders issued by the Trump administration.
The center was able to keep going for a while and had been developing strategies for how it could stay afloat, including seeking private donors, but Hutchinson and others said it already operated on a very thin margin, and the loss of several major funding sources ultimately spelled the end.
“It has just been obstacle after obstacle in this political climate,” Hutchinson said. “The environment itself is so hostile to nonprofits who accept all cases.”
The Kentucky Equal Justice Center was founded in 1976 and has worked on a variety of issues over the years, from long-term care to human trafficking.
The nonpartisan organization has a history of filing lawsuits on behalf of low-income Kentuckians and advocating for a variety of groups, including renters, residents of mobile home parks and people with substance use disorder.
While many organizations providing legal aid have restrictions on what kind of clients they can take, KEJC did not.
“We’ve always existed as a support for other legal aid organizations,” Hutchinson said.
In addition to working on litigation and providing direct service legal assistance, she said the center also did public advocacy work, keeping an eye on “bad bills” in the Kentucky legislature and working to build coalitions that could mount a “counter argument” representing the interests of “those who are below the poverty line.”
The Maxwell Street Legal Clinic, which was formed in 1999 and has been under KEJC’s umbrella since 2008, specialized in immigration law.
Jackson Cooper, senior general counsel and director of legal programs for the center, said some of the organization’s partners were fearful of providing funding or had lost hope that the work could continue to be successful.
He said the “bitter irony” is that the people the center and legal clinic served are more in need of their help than ever before.
Cooper said the center is working to find attorneys willing to take over the cases of several hundred people the clinic is representing. He said many of their cases involved filing initial paperwork and then waiting, often for years, for an answer, so attorneys are needed to take over that waiting game.
“We have to notify all of those clients and do our best to try to find new representation for them,” he said.
“The landscape for immigration work is very difficult,” Cooper said. “We’re hoping to find new attorneys for everyone, but that’s going to be a very tough effort.”
He asked attorneys willing to help to reach out to the center.
Hutchinson said the outlook for organizations like the Kentucky Equal Justice Center is dim.
“I don’t think that we’re the last, unfortunately,” she said.
Lexington attorney and KEJC board member Bruce Simpson said the center served as “the last line of assistance” for some people, and he said its loss will be devastating.
“This is personally gut-wrenching for me and other members of the board,” he said.
Hutchinson said the organization’s paid staff had already been reduced by about half in the first few months of this year, leaving just 13 employees.
“We’re really proud of the work that we’ve done,” she said. “We are all just so thankful we had the opportunity to do this work. These are amazing people. They gave all of their heart. I was always just about helping Kentuckians.”
