Until recently, immigration cases were a very small part of the work of the Second Circuit. In 1999, when I started as a court of appeals judge, the immigration docket was a minuscule percentage of our workload. But within a few years, the immigration docket approached 40% of the case load – and, as a result, our Court developed procedures to manage such cases, devised largely by Jon Newman under the chief judgeship of John Walker. This system continues to this day. Since 2006, We have adjudicated more than seventeen thousand immigration cases. In all too many cases, I could not but notice a substantial impediment to the fair and effective administration of justice: the too-often deficient counsel of represented noncitizens. For immigrants, the stakes could not be greater – whether they can stay in the United States, whether they will be separated from their loved ones, often their children. In all too many cases, I had the sense that if only the immigrant had competent counsel at the very outset of immigration proceedings where the record is made with lasting effect – long before the case reached the court of appeals where review is limited – the outcome might have been different, the noncitizen might have prevailed.