Good evening, all! My name is Anna Marie Gallagher, and I am the executive director here at CLINIC. It is such a joy to be with you at this CLINIC Convening in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to all who have traveled from near and far to come together to learn and reflect on our work serving our immigrant and refugee brothers and sisters through legal services.

I want to begin by taking a moment to thank all our local Minnesota folks present who help to make Minnesota the welcoming state that it is, with such a large and vibrant immigrant population and excellent services available to help newcomers.

I also want to acknowledge the rich Indigenous history of this place, of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples whose ancestral and current homeland we are on, and to celebrate the tapestry of cultures that now make up this city.

I also want to thank and acknowledge the local Church, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, and the local Bishop, Archbishop Hebda, for your work advocating for justice for our immigrant brothers and sisters and serving them in the spirit of the Gospel call to welcome the stranger.

As Archbishop Hebda has said regarding immigration policy, it is our call to “stand for mercy as best as we’re able to.”

In 2024 we happen to be gathering during CLINIC’s 35^th anniversary year, which has been a marvelous opportunity for us to reflect as an organization and network on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

The theme we chose for our anniversary year is a four-word summary of our mission: upholding dignity, protecting rights. It is what we’ve been doing since the beginning – recognizing and promoting the inherent, God-given dignity of immigrants, and protecting their legal rights enshrined in U.S. and international law.

As many of you know – and some of you may have even been around since the beginning – CLINIC was founded 35 years ago by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to support a growing network of community and faith-based organizations who were working to meet the overwhelming needs of immigrants seeking legal services following the 1986 legislation that transformed the immigration system and granted amnesty to millions.

At our founding, we were a group of just 17 organizations banding together to respond to huge needs with what little knowledge and capacity we had. In 35 years, we have grown into the largest immigration law organization serving low-income immigrants in the U.S. – a network that has touched millions of lives.

And you know how we accomplished that growth? Through starting small, dreaming big, and responding creatively to the need in front of us at any given moment.

This is the same kind of work I know you all do in your offices every day – you recognize an unfilled need, and commit yourselves to the quiet, humble, grueling work of figuring out how to fill it.

You do this through spending hours upon hours with clients, calming their fears and anxieties, explaining complicated processes, and celebrating wins; through going through mountains of paperwork; through stretching every last dollar at your organization; through intensive preparation for court and interviews; through continued legal study; through trial and error while building new programs – the list goes on.

Throughout these three and a half decades, when the CLINIC network has identified a pressing need, or an opportunity to uphold dignity and protect rights, we have risen to the challenge.

When Haitian asylum seekers arrived in large numbers to Miami, we helped create a new project and staffed up to assist them. When legal and human rights violations at immigrant detention centers came to light, we were at the forefront of the movement to push for change.

When numbers of unaccompanied child migrant arrivals skyrocketed, we helped create new legal initiatives and engaged in advocacy on their behalf.

Over the years we have also come together to litigate against policies harming our immigrant communities – and we have been an incredibly powerful voice for justice because of our national presence.

Today, when we are seeing new humanitarian parole programs emerge, disturbing anti-immigrant state policies proposed, and record numbers of migrants arriving at our borders, the CLINIC network is still rising to the challenge.

I am so, so proud to help uplift and amplify that work. And I am incredibly humbled to be standing in a room full of such holy people as you all, doing such sacred, critical, lifesaving work.

I want to share a short story from my own experience that reminds me of the sacredness of the work we are all engaged in.

I have several pro bono clients, as many of us do at CLINIC, and one of them is a Honduras mother who was separated from her five-year-old for a year and a half while in immigration detention. Her case was extremely complex; it required hours of listening to her story and considering ways she could win her case.

As she spoke, bonds of trust formed between us, and she shared with me pieces of her story, parts of her trauma, that she had not shared with anyone else.

I soon realized I was helping her carry her cross, her weariness and sadness – and the more I got to know her, the higher I knew the stakes were for her case. Losing meant severe suffering; winning was the only endurable outcome.

This case – like many others in my career – brought me to my knees.

So many times, I have asked myself how my clients live through what they have, and so many times have I cried out to God for guidance and for a miracle.

It is love alone, and the grace of God, that helps me carry on in these cases, and keeps my clients moving forward. It is the same love that I know keeps you all coming back to work every day, despite the challenges.

The faces of our clients – their stories, their crosses – keep us going in this sacred work. The stakes are high, the hours are long, but the love is real, and the victories are incredibly sweet.

I often ask myself, what fills our hearts and souls to keep going in this work? It is the transformation of our clients, and our own transformation in the process.

This week, we are gathering to learn practical skills and to share our experiences and knowledge through training and discussion, so that we can better fulfill our mission of upholding dignity and protecting rights.

We are also gathering for celebration and solidarity in this work – to be with those who understand the case wins and losses, the highs and the lows - and to recognize its shared impact on our lives and souls.

We have held Convening each year since 1998 for these worthwhile reasons – and I am thrilled that this year will be the highest-ever attended Convening, with over one thousand participants.

The growth of Convening signifies for me the growth of our network and the legal services capacity for low-income immigrants in the United States. The demand is ever present and ever growing – so it is heartening to see how more and more people are joining the effort to meet that need.

At CLINIC, we remain committed to evolving to meet the needs of our network and the communities they serve.

I want to invite our staff members to stand for a moment and wave. Thank you so much, CLINIC staff, for all you have done to prepare for this gathering! In addition, we want to emphasize that our staff are here to listen and learn from you and to hear your feedback and suggestions. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

In this anniversary year, we look back with gratitude and forward with anticipation. Inspired by the motto of Minneapolis, “en avant!” – “Forward!” – let us dream together about what we can achieve for justice for immigrants.

Thank you for your commitment to this essential work and for joining us at Convening in this 35^th anniversary year. We hope you learn, network, grow in solidarity, celebrate, and enjoy these next few days.

Thank you.