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Immigrant Justice Clinic

Immigrant Justice Clinic

In the Immigrant Justice Clinic (IJC), law students, working in teams under the supervision of clinical faculty, represent noncitizen clients in a variety of immigration matters; engage in immigrant rights’ advocacy projects; and conduct intakes at immigration detention centers in conjunction with attorneys from the PAIR Project.

The types of cases that IJC students handle include applications for asylum, U-visas, T-visas, and other forms of relief, as well as bond hearings in Immigration Court. Students manage all aspects of their cases, including interviewing, fact development, legal research, drafting and oral advocacy.

Left to right: Zoe Bowman ’21, Rebecca Sparks ’24, Nora Doherty ’24, Noelle Gulick ’24, Blessing Eyee ’23, Jennifer Gonzales ’24 and Ali Chaudhary ’23 spent a week volunteering for the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

The Immigrant Justice Clinic also puts students on the front lines of the immigration crisis: not just in the classroom, but at the border and inside detention centers across the country. Through donor-funded trips, students have traveled to El Paso, Texas, to assist Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that has served more than 40,000 people from more than 77 countries, providing free and low-cost legal services to immigrants and refugees in West Texas and New Mexico. Students have also worked inside the nation’s largest family detention center in Dilley, Texas, where immigrant mothers and children — mostly fleeing extreme violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — need lawyers. There, students partnered with the Dilley Pro Bono Project to offer direct legal representation in a non-traditional pro bono model. Most recently, a team of students traveled to the Otay Mesa Detention Center outside San Diego, where they worked with the ABA’s Immigration Justice Project on parole applications for detained migrants, and made an immediate difference: one client’s signed representation form halted a summary deportation in its tracks. Back in the clinic, students take cases all the way to conclusion, including winning asylum for a woman and her son from Mexico, the culmination of nearly a year of work across six students and two faculty members.

Students have also documented the harmful effects of arrests of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at courthouses in Massachusetts.

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Professor Hemanth Gundavaram (center), director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic, with students.

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Affiliated Faculty

Hemanth Gundavaram

Clinical Professor and Associate Dean for Experiential Education; Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic; Director, Clinical Programs

 

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Anne Georges

Interim Co-Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic

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