Every day the prisoners, dressed in jumpsuits and with one hand shackled to a metal chain hanging around their waists, are led into the locked immigration courtroom at 100 Varick St. where criminal deportation cases are heard.

There, thousands of defendants, both legal residents and undocumented immigrants, stand trial, without representation, and probably without a full understanding of the charges or how to defend themselves.

And almost without exception, at least one immigrant from the Dominican Republic is on the docket.

For some Dominican immigrants caught in this legal labyrinth, the system may soon get a shade clearer. In a partnership announced yesterday, Columbia University is giving its law school students the opportunity to fulfill a requirement of pro-bono hours by providing counsel in heavily Dominican northern Manhattan in deportation and removal proceedings.

It is a service that is greatly needed. In 1996, Congress greatly expanded the number of crimes for which legal residents can be removed. The legislation has had profound consequences. In New York City, Dominicans have been hit hardest. Thousands have been deported, most of them, but not all, as a result of criminal convictions – sometimes for relatively minor crimes, and sometimes ones that were committed decades ago.

“I can’t tell you one person that isn’t affected within the Dominican community,” said the director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Raquel Batista. That group created a family support group this summer and will host the new community law partnership.

A forthcoming study by the advocacy group Families for Freedom confirmed her impressions. It found that among Dominican New Yorkers surveyed, fully 85% said they personally knew at least one person who had been deported, compared with less than 50% for the general immigrant community.

Even before Julissa Reynoso received her law degree from Columbia, the calls from friends and relatives requesting help with immigration and criminal deportation cases began pouring in. Now an associate with the corporate firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, she then lacked the expertise and the time to keep up with the demand.

“I was touched by friends and family who were getting picked up for deportation and there was no way for me to adequately help them and nowhere for me to actually turn to go to,” Ms. Reynoso said.

Among the more than 20 people who have contacted her is an uncle being held in detention awaiting deportation upstate. “These are people who are residents, who have been here for like 10 to 15 years or came as young people.”

Ms. Reynoso went to State Senator Eric Schneiderman, whose district includes heavily Dominican neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan, and requested his help in early 2003. A lawyer, Mr. Schneiderman said it was clear “we had a huge demand for legal services and basically no supply,” explaining that in the civil proceedings in immigration court the defendant has no guaranteed right to a lawyer.

“In a legal scene this confusing, everyone should have right to counsel,” the Democrat said.

More than a year later, the combined efforts of Ms. Reynoso and Mr. Schneiderman have come to fruition, with Columbia pledging $300,000 to establish its first immigrant rights clinic, in partnership with Alianza Dominicana and the Legal Aid Society.

The center, located in Washington Heights, came too late for Jose Martinez Reyes.

On a recent afternoon at immigration court, Reyes, a slight man with a wrinkled brow who was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and black hightop sneakers, listened so intensely to the translator that the judge asked if he had a hearing problem.

“No,” Reyes responded in English, insisting he just wanted to make sure he understood clearly.

Though Reyes married an American citizen, he never received legal status, which would have required leaving the country and returning to the Dominican Republic. Still, with four children in America he thought the punishment too harsh for the crime of cocaine possession, for which he had already served prison time.

“I completed my five years of probation,” he told the judge. “They congratulated me because I never failed to attend probation. This is my only felony. I have family here and I’ve never been back to jail.”

The judge responded that it was Congress that determined the law, and his only role was to apply it. “You might think that’s unfair,” the judge said, “but that’s the way the law is.”