Since 2001, the BIA Pro Bono Appeals Project, an initiative within CLINIC’s Defending Vulnerable Populations department, has matched immigrants with pro bono counsel to defend their cases before the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA. The majority of appeals reaching the BIA involve orders of removal and applications for relief from removal.

As a legal assistant for the project, I have multiple responsibilities: sending out consent forms, answering phone calls from detention centers, redacting briefs, drafting case summaries for the weekly newsletter, and assisting clients after they have obtained relief. There is one of my responsibilities, however, that has offered first-hand accounts on the conditions and needs of people in detention. For an entire year, I have been the one who has direct communication with the clients selected for the project. Their initial reactions after receiving the letter informing them of the opportunity to receive counsel is always one of astonishment, as the majority of our clients lack the financial resources to afford an attorney. Client phone calls and letters expressing profound gratitude and offering their blessings to CLINIC reflect such sentiments.

The circumstances and stories of men and women who are detained are diverse, but all have something in common: they want the opportunity of a better life and to be treated with dignity and respect throughout this process. I have learned that immigrants would not leave their families behind and risk their lives to come to the United States if their wellbeing and safety were not at risk. Parents flee because they want to protect their children from gang recruitment. People flee persecution from their own government. Others who are detained have legal status and have ties and roots in the United States. To serve as a liaison between client and attorney is a reminder that I am giving vulnerable populations an opportunity to seek relief and have their voices heard.

Being able to communicate fluently with many of our clients in their mother tongue, i.e., Spanish, helps lessen the language barrier that vulnerable communities encounter in their immigration proceedings. Most clients do not know what to do when their cases reach the BIA. In fact, some mention seeking help from fellow detainees, who are English speakers, to translate case-related documents. Every time I answer the phone, the first question they ask is if I speak Spanish. Immediately, when I say “si, hablo español,” the clients breathe a sigh of relief knowing that someone can finally understand them. For the most part, clients tell me their story and rely on me for assistance when communicating with their attorneys.

I am the enlace, or link, that creates the attorney-client relationship. In that relationship, one side is away from their homeland and family and, perhaps, locked in detention for the first time in their lives.

Earlier in 2019, I visited a detention center to gain an understanding of what my clients go through on an everyday basis. Stepping into a detention center was heartbreaking and depressing, to say the least. Walking through the hallways, visitors could see rooms filled with bunk beds, with adjacent toilets and showers. During the visit, some areas were off-limits due to a mumps outbreak.

When screening the detainees, some were afraid of telling anyone why there were there, and some aspects of their identity. There is a stark contrast between individuals who are detained and those who are not detained, as they wait to receive a decision from the BIA. Many immigrants in detention, who are facing removal, want to be with their loved ones to enjoy as much time as possible with them. Others choose detention if it keeps them from returning to home countries where they may be persecuted. At the end of the visit, I had the option to return home. The people I encountered behind closed walls did not.

The work CLINIC does to protect the rights of immigrants is important. As we continue to expand efforts to represent more immigrants in detention before the BIA, it is critical to honor the legal process and the lives of this vulnerable population.

Updates from CLINIC’s border initiative since last November have been consistent in two ways: 1) Luis Guerra—CLINIC’s strategic capacity officer and one of the organization’s many superheroes—was working hard to organize chaos; and 2) the situation in Tijuana, Mexico sounded like a warzone. When I arrived, I only found one to still be true.

Although CLINIC had been working with asylum seekers on the ground since Thanksgiving weekend—when migrant families, Luis and his colleagues were tear-gassed—the Communications team did not have much information beyond Luis’s reporting, limited by his busy schedule. This made it difficult to promote CLINIC’s work and partnerships. Thus, on March 21, I packed a camera and a notebook and drove to the border to shadow Luis and his team of volunteers.

I had expected the trip to Tijuana to mirror a previous one to Nogales, during which I saw asylum seekers camped outside the U.S. port of entry, waiting for their turn to be screened. Some had waited for weeks and grew so desperate they decided to take the risky desert journey to claim asylum in the United States.

Tijuana is not Nogales. Where Nogales is a town sprung from rocks, unified but for the metal wound of a fence dividing it, Tijuana is its own behemoth of a city.

The walk across the bridge was uneventful and, frankly, seemed lax. In fact, officials waved away attempts to show them documents. On the way to meet Luis at the Border Rights Project, there were no signs of the rumored migrant camps. Later, I learned that most people were in shelters, almost all of them at capacity.

Walking through downtown was uneventful in the practically empty streets, with the occasional rancheras, traditional Mexican ranch music, blasting from nearby restaurants. However, a missing person poster of a boy, possibly 16 or so, was a reminder of Luis’s reports on the exploitation of migrant arrivals and the deaths of unaccompanied minors from Central America in Tijuana.

The Border Rights Project building is a four-story house with a restaurant on the main floor, a medical bay on the second, a workshop area on the third, and headquarters on the fourth floor.

When Luis arrived in Tijuana, he wanted to offer legal screening services, but ended up creating an entire program from scratch. He began conducting volunteer trainings, assigning roles and creating policies and procedures. His reports were accurate, he truly had been organizing chaos, but that chaos of hundreds of volunteers attempting to serve hundreds of migrants was now structured. In a little over 100 days since Thanksgiving weekend, Luis and 1,300 volunteers had conducted more than 2,100 individual legal consultations.

“You are automatically in danger by just being in the building,” said Luis. He made it clear to me that Mexican officials and local groups were against the project, and migrants received the worst treatment. This was the war zone part of the updates. After telling him I would stay, he told me some volunteers who heard his warnings did not.

Conversations with Luis were sporadic through the day, as headquarters buzzed in preparation for the day’s workshop. When he wasn’t putting out fires or being pulled into meetings, he introduced me to volunteers. His A-team had been there for weeks—one of them for three months. The project had had many volunteers, but turnover was high. Initially, this meant volunteer trainings were conducted every day, but they had now slowed to once a week. A professional social justice IT volunteer, who had also supported the Standing Rock protests, stood out.

Another person who caught my attention was Alejandra, a staff member with Al Otro Lado, the main organization behind the Border Rights Project. While Luis ran logistics for the entire project, Alejandra organized workshop logistics and assigned services according to each person’s needs—including childcare, food and medical assistance.

Alejandra also ensured those who spoke different languages were treated fairly. Volunteers would split groups based on language and conduct Know Your Rights trainings simultaneously before screenings began. If a translator was not available during the screening, the team would locate translation support in Russian, French, even a Cameroonian language, among others. Since Thanksgiving, more than 50 countries had been represented at the workshops.

The number of screenings ranged from 50 to 100 people in one day, taking volunteers long hours to process. A workshop had been hosted every day since November. The level of effort, coordination and commitment demonstrated by these volunteers was astounding.

The importance of the team’s actions is something Luis does not let them forget. Every afternoon, he meetsto ask volunteers about the daily highs and lows. That day, nearly all volunteers spoke of the joy of helping someone, even in a small way. They too had received Luis’s warning speech. These people—law students, grandparents, college kids, attorneys—put their safety at risk in a foreign country to do what they believed was right. In the process, they learned about the difficulties and complexities of supporting asylum seekers.

Crossing back after work, the U.S.-Mexico bridge felt as divided as the day’s experience had been. Feelings of sorrow arose when I remembered a child with a blank stare, whose parents worked on their asylum papers nearby. He was not the only one experiencing trauma. The horrifying feeling, however, was countered by the hope of witnessing good, hard-working people willing to stand up for asylum seekers and help them heal. The work CLINIC does to support volunteers at the border is helping save lives.

After two years as a project within Training, Litigation and Support, Defending Vulnerable Populations on March 1 became a separate department within CLINIC. Though it comes as an acknowledgment of the importance of the work DVP has developed, the change primarily shapes administrative functions within CLINIC.

DVP Director Michelle Mendez will continue to lead the team of attorneys and administrative professionals with vast experience serving vulnerable immigrants and offering legal support to immigrant advocates. CLINIC attorneys Vickie Neilson and Rebecca Scholtz will serve as DVP’s managing attorney and senior attorney, respectively.

With this change, CLINIC will streamline the administrative side of multiple projects and initiatives that respond to the growing needs of legal immigration practitioners and community advocates who work with vulnerable populations. Their efforts focus on deportation crackdowns, family separation, employment loss and other disruptive effects of the administration’s policy changes.

DVP will take on federal litigation efforts for CLINIC, with attorney Bradley Jenkins in a new role as federal litigation attorney. Attorney Rachel Naggar will take on Jenkins’s previous responsibility of coordinating the BIA Pro Bono Appeals Project. DVP attorneys also will continue to track immigration cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeals and federal District Courts.

"At a time when ICE is ramping up enforcement against immigrants, I hope the BIA Pro Bono Project can continue to increase access to high quality legal representation for this vulnerable population,” said Naggar. Jenkins highlighted the significant role volunteers and staff have had on the BIA Project’s success, while looking forward to his new role as federal litigation attorney for DVP.

“The role is exciting and an opportunity to make the immigration system more fair,” said Jenkins.

Mendez said her team will work alongside trusted allies to develop cutting-edge models for remote legal representation and continue offering “training, mentoring and litigation with advocacy in the form of amicus briefing, reports, comments to proposed regulations, the press and other media.”

She added: “for the Defending Vulnerable Populations team, it is an honor to train, mentor and work with immigration practitioners.”

CLINIC’s Executive Director Ana Gallagher said she looks forward to working with DVP, particularly in identifying key litigation projects and drawing on the team’s expertise to further maximize and strengthen organizational efforts.

“CLINIC will undertake litigation in a smart, strategic and measured approach, choosing issues that benefit our network and uphold CLINIC’s mission,” Gallagher said.

To learn more about DVP and its new initiatives, visit cliniclegal.org/defending-vulnerable-populations-project