"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Paulina Vera President, Hispanic Bar Association of DC PHOTO: Linkedin
As I have mentioned before, I’m proud that Paulina is an alum of the Legacy Arlington Immigration Court Internship Program and a “charter member” of the NDPA!
For those of you who don’t know her, here’s Paulina’s “official bio” from the GW Law website:
Paulina Vera supervises GW Law Immigration Clinic students and provides legal representation to asylum-seekers and respondents facing deportation in Immigration Court. She is a Professorial Lecturer In Law and has taught Immigration Law I.
Ms. Vera previously served as the only Immigration Staff Attorney at the Maryland-based non-profit, CASA.
She is a double GW alumna. In 2015, Ms. Vera graduated from the George Washington University Law School. During law school, she was a student-attorney at the Immigration Clinic. In 2012, she graduated from GW with a Bachelor in Arts in International Affairs, concentrating on Latin American Studies and International Politics and a minor in Spanish Language and Literature.
Ms. Vera is involved in a number of professional organizations. She is the President-Elect of the Hispanic Bar Association of DC (HBA-DC), a scholar for the American Bar Association (ABA) YLD Leadership Academy, and a member of the inaugural Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) National Task Force on Hispanic Law Professors and Deans. She also serves as the Public Relations Director for the GW Latino Law Alumni Association (LLAA).
Ms. Vera has been recognized locally and nationally; she is the recipient of the GW Latinx Excellence Awards, Alma Award (2019), DC Courts Community Agency CORO Award (2019), Hispanic Bar Association of DC (HBA-DC) Rising Star Award (2019), and the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) Top Lawyers Under 40 Award (2021).
Her passion project is managing an online community called Hermanas In The Law, where she features Latinas thinking about law school, Latina law students, and Latina lawyers. Ms. Vera is originally from Tucson, AZ and is the proud daughter of two immigrants.”
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You can also learn more about Paulina and her many accomplishments by clicking on her name in the “Courtside” sidebar!
Paulina is just the brilliant, honest, values-driven, charismatic leader that America needs for a better future!
EOIR to Host National Stakeholder Meeting for Law School Immigration Clinics
SUMMARY: The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) invites faculty, staff, and students from law school immigration clinics to attend a national stakeholder meeting focused on pro bono advocacy.
EOIR continues to build upon the guidance in EOIR Director Memorandum 22-01, Encouraging and Facilitating Pro Bono Legal Services, and welcomes the public’s input in evaluating our efforts to increase representation in immigration court proceedings. During the meeting, agency leadership will summarize feedback received during its April series of listening sessions, discuss steps EOIR has taken since those meetings, and share ideas for future initiatives as we collaborate to strengthen pro bono representation in immigration courts.
Following that discussion, agency leadership will welcome stakeholder input regarding ways to increase pro bono representation for Dedicated Dockets.
DATE: TIME: LOCATION:
Sept. 21, 2023
2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Eastern Time
Live via Webex – Meeting Registration
All media inquiries should be directed to the Communications and Legislative Affairs Division at pao.eoir@usdoj.gov.
We all know that EOIR is struggling. Unrepresented and under-represented individuals are basically “cannon fodder” for a hopelessly backlogged system where due process, fundamental fairness, and meticulous scholarship are too often afterthoughts, at best.
Insuring that individuals facing this dysfunctional system are well-represented is key to both saving lives and holding EOIR accountable. It also supports those judges at both levels who are fighting to restore due process, fundamental fairness, decisional excellence, and best practices to EOIR.
EOIR is widely known for its lack of transparency. Every nugget of information about the Immigration Court system’s practices, policies, objectives, and operating plans is therefore precious.
Also, giving EOIR honest feedback about some of the “real life” roadblocks and unnecessary challenges (like, for example, endemic Aimless Docket Reshuffling, arbitrary expedited dockets, and courts located inside prisons and other obscure, largely inaccessible, locations) is a critical chance to push back against mindless bureaucracy and suggest effective, practical solutions that enhance, rather than impede, due process.
Unfortunately, few of those shaping EOIR practices have recent experience actually trying to represent pro bono clients in this often “user unfriendly” and unnecessarily chaotic system. (It’s routinely described by experienced practitioners as the “Wild West of American Law.”) This is YOUR chance to learn and to inject a “dose of reality” into an agency that too often operates in a parallel universe.
GW Law Immigration Clinic Director Professor Alberto Benítez & Co-Director Professor Paulina Vera — They have dedicated their professional careers to teaching skills and values that change lives and advance a vision of a better future America!
Professor Alberto Benítez reports to Courtside:
Victory is the only option!
A shout-out to our student-attorneys Julia Yang, Spoorthi Datla, Cornelia Waugh, and Kelly Zhang. Yesterday our client S-L, from China, Kelly, and Paulina Vera attended an interview at USCIS. The client is a survivor of domestic violence and we had filed several applications on her behalf, including one for naturalization. Today all the applications were granted. S-L’s oath ceremony will be scheduled.
Given the endemic delays at every level of the dysfunctional USG immigration bureaucracy, seeing a case through from the initial application to eventual naturalization is no mean feat!😎 THIS, NOT the total disgraceful BS emanating from Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, and the rest of the GOP xenophobes, is what the REAL “American Dream” is all about and what REALLY “Makes America Great” — NOT totally disingenuous slogans and “throwaway lines” from those afraid to embrace and celebrate the REAL America!🇺🇸
The future of American immigration advocacy looks promising, notwithstanding the incredibly dark visions being falsely promoted by GOP restrictionists and the disturbingly feeble response from the Biden Administration and Dems in Congress. The talent in the “New Generation” of the NDPA continues to grow thanks to the inspiration and tutelage of Professors Benitez and Vera and many others like them who have dedicated their lives to making things better for everyone!
As a result, there is a rapidly expanding talent gap between the NDPA and the sluggish, unresponsive, “go along to get along” USG immigration bureaucracy — right up to the White House where so-called “policy makers” fear standing up for the rule of law and American values! Getting the talent from the “outside” to the “inside” where they can solve problems and advance progressive, practical American values is the challenge that will determine the future of our democracy!
Professor Hilary T. Fraser Cornell Law PHOTO: Cornell Law
Cornell Law School Afghanistan Assistance Clinic: Spring 2023 Report
May 15, 2023
By Hilary Fraser, Adjunct Professor
In our third semester offering the Afghan Assistance Clinic to Cornell law students, we saw a change in the type of cases and clients and a change in the kind of students. In our initial semester a year ago, our clinic students had backgrounds in immigration and human rights law. Our clients were all Fulbright recipients recently arrived in the United States, and the cases were rich with evidence of the likelihood of future persecution due to the client’s activism and training with western donor nations in building of democratic institutions.
At the start of this semester, there was some dismay that our clients’ cases seemed not as strong. Most clients were younger, some just freshmen in the United States. “I don’t think she has a case,” one student initially remarked about his client. Our students were also new to client representation, and more tentative about interviewing the clients and gathering facts.
To overcome these challenges, we decided to drill down on the fact that our clients had lived through a year or so of Taliban rule. Hadn’t they actually experienced persecution in the year or more that passed before they were able to escape? Weren’t their escape stories a symbol of their fears? The Taliban’s announcements that floggings and amputations were legitimate punishments; that women could not work, attend high school, leave home without a chaperone or visit parks and gyms; that universities were shuttered, the internet policed, passport offices closed and ‘vice’ and religion fastidiously monitored did not pose just future possibilities of harm, but rather defined the lives our clients had lived.
We also decided to drill down on our interpersonal skills and bring our own humanity into the client-student relationship. We needed to break through our clients’ reticence formed during a dangerous year of living in hiding from the Taliban regime. Nearly all of our clients told us how closely they guarded their plans to apply to school in the United States. Our clients also feared talking with us. Their families did not want to write support letters. We also had clients who came to the United States just before Kabul fell, but still hadn’t filed for asylum. We needed to work with the problem of depression.
Our students overcame these barriers in several ways.
One way our students engaged these reticent clients was through a shared immigration experience. Seven of our 12 class members were immigrants themselves, which helped form a bond of trust and a shared understanding of the vocabulary and process of immigration. Some took our clinic to understand better their parents’ experiences as immigrants to the United States. Some were interested in understanding better their own asylum or other residency applications.
Clever solutions also helped us elicit the clients’ stories. Related clients and clients who were friends and classmates from Afghanistan were represented by students who collaborated (with consent) on evidence and stories. This small-group approach made our process more efficient and our clients more comfortable. Also, we drew upon the experience of two classmates participating in the clinic for the third time, one as a Pro Bono Scholar and one as an indefatigable research assistant who won a public interest award from Cornell this semester. These senior students lent their experience to the class.
Last but not least, we made the Cornell connection. Twelve of our 15 clients this semester are scholars or students at Cornell. Working in person, even working with a shared sense of the environment and terrain of campus, forged relationships of trust. Plus, it just felt good to be helping a “neighbor.”
Our client narratives and legal claims eventually emerged. Political opinion was imputed from parents and from students’ choices of academic fields and universities. Race and religion were the most frequently claimed protected grounds, with Hazara ethnicity and atheism the most common fact patterns. “Westernized” individuals as a particular social group defined the elite group of young students talented enough to make it out of Afghanistan in a year when borders were mostly closed.
As a group, this semester’s clients could be seen as the younger “siblings” of the first groups of our clients. Growing up in a hopeful time of relative ease and opportunity in Afghanistan during occupation, they were free to foster their spirituality, self-expression, and learning. Please meet some of them here below. The client who we originally thought didn’t have a claim turned out to be one of our strongest cases, together with:
· A client who wrote and self-published on Amazon an English-language book on Love and God. A true romantic and humanist with a respect for literature.
· A client who obtained a U.S. visa just in time for her to escape a forced marriage and land in a top mathematics Ph.D. program in the United States.
· A client who grew up hearing the harrowing stories of parents who had suffered beatings and death threats under the Taliban and escaped to Iran, where treatment of Afghans is only slightly less horrific.
· A client who paints human representational art, fearlessly showing female bodies and intimate settings. Their work of 70+ canvases hides in residential attics in Afghanistan.
· A client whose transition to atheism is clearly recalled in a series of private conversations with peers and mentors, two of whom were murdered in honor killings pursuant to a fatwa.
· A client who was part of seminal schools for women and who received a leadership scholarship to attend school in the United States from an American fashion celebrity.
In short, our clinic honored these stories by acknowledging the teller’s experience. We realize that save for our small group of students, no one else other than the USCIS asylum adjudicator will hear these moving tales. Someday, we’d like to transform the stories into spoken-word theater!
This class was dedicated to learning immigration and helping their clients. Almost all this semester’s students will graduate to positions with large law firms. Their commitment to our clinic’s work signals that immigration has become a necessary skill set for both corporate and public interest lawyers.
Overall, we filed 15 asylum cases this semester, representing the collective work of 8 first-time students, 2 second-time students, a Pro Bono scholar, a research assistant, and an adjunct professor. By summer 2023, 30+ Afghan asylum applications filed by our clinic will remain pending, a terrific accomplishment in just 15 months of work.
Other landmarks reached this semester include:
o Our first semester clients received work permits or renewals.
o Two of our second semester clients had asylum interviews.
o All our second semester clients qualified for online work permit applications for the first time.
o We did a presentation for Weill Cornell medical students.
o We heard two presentations from Afghan political analysts.
o An Afghan student group was formed on campus through the work of our clients.
o We helped almost all the Afghans at Cornell who needed us.
o We kept abreast of dynamic changes in asylum practice – both at the border and expansion of parole programs.
o We mentored the law school’s 1L immigration clinic, which filed four other Afghan affirmative asylum applications.
This really hits home for me. I’m fresh off teaching with outstanding colleagues — subject matter experts and experienced civil and criminal litigators working together seamlessly —at the Sharma Crawford Clinic Litigation Trial College in Kansas City, KS. As usual, a large part of the “hands on” experience was coaching students on how to best elicit information from clients — across cultural and language barriers — and then to present their stories in a fashion that will be gripping and compelling to Asylum Officers, Immigration Judges, DHS Assistant Chief Counsel, and would make a great and “reader friendly” record for appellate judges and their clerks, should that step be necessary.
Consequently, I really appreciate the skill set that Hilary is helping her students develop! And, as we emphasized at our Trial College, this isn’t just an Immigration Court skill. No, it’s a “life skill” that folks will use over and over in their professional careers and personal lives!
The skills necessary to practice law these days start at the “retail level” of our justice system — the Immigration Courts. As I tell myGeorgetown Law students, “If you can win one of these cases, everything else in law and life will be a piece of cake!”
Thanks to my long-time friend and Hilary’s colleague, Professor Stephen Yale Loehr, for alerting me to this important achievement.
“Juana,” a client of the Asylum & Convention Against Torture Clinic and Annunciation House in Texas, after she won asylum and was released from detention in spring 2019.
Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic Celebrates 20th Anniversary
February 17, 2023
Twenty years ago, Cornell Law School established its Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic. Since then, some 200 students have represented close to 100 clients. In a system where the vast majority of asylum seekers lose their appeals, the clinic has won an estimated sixty-six percent of its cases.
“Because of the complexity of immigration law, it is very hard to win asylum for someone,” says clinic codirector Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of Immigration Law Practice. “We are fortunate that we have excellent students who work tirelessly to save their clients from persecution or torture.”
Emily Rivera ’23, who is taking the clinic for a second year, writes, “This has been the most rewarding experience of my law school career. From working on federal court appeals to submitting request releases on behalf of detained clients, I have had the chance to engage in work that I am deeply passionate about.”
The experience has inspired careers in immigration law—and also deeply informed alumni’s work in other areas. Neethu Putta ’19, who took the clinic for two years as a student and now contributes to its work as an adjunct professor, observes, “The clinic taught me how to artfully frame issues and tell a client’s narrative in a way that leaves the court no choice but to find for them. As a practicing commercial litigator, I now use those skills daily.”
Clinic codirector Estelle McKee, clinical professor of law (Lawyering), notes that the clinic offers students a unique glimpse into the lives of individuals whose paths they would otherwise never cross. “Our clients are brave; many have undergone unspeakable persecution and torture, and have embarked on treacherous journeys to protect their families,” she says. “Their experiences and persistence offer students deep insight into the importance of zealous advocacy.”
McKee shares some comments sent to her by clinic clients. A Salvadoran asylum-seeker wrote, “I sincerely want to thank you for all your willingness, commitment, responsibility, and the respect with which you offer me your help. Few people do what you did for me, so I will be forever grateful to you.” [translated from Spanish]
Another reflection comes from a Cameroonian client who had been found “not credible” by an immigration judge and was ailing in a for-profit prison when the clinic took up his case. Against the odds, McKee and her students were able to get the case reopened and will represent this asylum-seeker as he returns to court. He says, “I continue to appreciate your care and concern and effort to my case… [Y]ou have really been a blessing to me… I will never forget you.”
For the professors as well, the experience has been unforgettable. Says Yale-Loehr, “The clinic has been a highlight of my legal career. I feel honored to have worked with so many excellent students over the years to help persecuted people win asylum and start a new life in the US.”
McKee adds, “There is nothing like clinical teaching. Not only does it present the opportunity to provide the representation so desperately needed by underserved populations, but it also enables a teacher to help shape the next generation of lawyers while also having an impact on the development of the law.”
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Clinical education has been the biggest development in modern legal education — applied scholarship, practical skills, changing lives, problem solving, and developing the law, all before students join the bar! No better way to learn than at the chaotic, high-stakes “retail level” of our justice system. As I often tell students, “If you can win one of these cases, in this environment, everything else in law and many of the challenges of life will be a piece of cake!”
Immigration and human rights clinics, like Cornell and many others, have been at the very forefront of innovation and the clinical teaching movement. That’s why many of the “superstars” of clinical teaching are now being “tapped” by their institutions for leadership positions as Deans, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, etc.
Where U.S. law remains “behind the eight ball:” Bringing these extraordinarily well-qualified “practical scholars,” leaders, and administrators onto the Federal Bench and in key leadership positions within the Government’s struggling legal bureaucracy, particularly in the dysfunctional agencies responsible for immigration, human rights, racial justice, due process, and equal justice. And, what passes for “policy making” on these issues in the Biden Administration is nothing short of a preventable and embarrassing humanitarian disaster!
Nowhere is this glaring disparity more obvious than between the dynamic talent and creativity in the private sector and the “backward looking, stuck in a rut, timid, uninspired” leadership inflicted on the public by these downward-spiraling, hugely wasteful and inefficient USG bureaucracies and the poorly-conceived and too often disingenuous “policies” (actually cruel “recycled Stephen Miller Lite gimmicks”) coming out of the West Wing!
🇺🇸 America needs change. And that requires some new faces, courage, innovation, and better solutions from the USG!The talent is available! Why are we being subjected to “Amateur Night at the Bijou” — or worse?
The Biden Administration has looked in some mighty strange places to assemble its amazingly inept human rights/immigration team. Why didn’t they try clinical programs and NGOs where the “real talent” is? That’s a question that the ghosts of dead and damaged legal asylum seekers might be asking for a long time to come! PHOTO: Thomas Hawk Creative Commons Amateur Night
Professor Kristina Campbell Visiting Professor S.J. Quinney College of Law U. of Utah PHOTO: Quinney Website
Kristina reports:
I just wanted to share with you that I launched a new Refugee Law Clinic at the University of Utah this semester! I am a visiting professor here & my students this semester are working with a Ukrainian family, as well as UACs from Afghanistan and Latin America. You can read more about the clinic here:
I also attached some photos of the clinic space at the law school:
Refugee Clinic @ S.J. Quinney PHOTO: K. Campbell
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Kristina and her UDC Clinic students were “regulars” at the “Legacy” Arlington Immigration Court during my tenure. Since retiring, I have had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer, along with my friend Judge Dorothy Harbeck, at clinic classes taught by Kristina and her amazing colleague, Professor Lindsay Harris. (Lindsay was a guest lecturer in my Refugee Law & Policy class @ Georgetown Law during her time as a CALS Asylum Clinic fellow.)
Thanks for the report Kristina. Those are lucky students and clients to have you working for and withthem! And, my gratitude and admiration for all you have done and continue to accomplish for justice in America. Scholar, author, advocate, creative thinker, educator, administrator, organizer, inspiring role model, innovator: You “check all the boxes,” Kristina!
Your students are so fortunate to have you for a teacher and inspiring example of all that’s best in American law!
Forgot to thank both of you for an amazing semester! This class has helped me not feel too down about law school and not judge my intelligence. I liked that both of you show the human side of law. Thank you for not only showing us that the subject is based on people, but also teaching in a way that showed you were approachable. I love that both of you know how to turn off the legal side and just talk to students about ordinary life, which has helped a lot in my ability to approach other professors. And, you both taught in a language that I can actually understand. Thanks again and I hope to have other professors like the two of you in the future!”
From a student in our Immigration Law I course. Thursday was the final class of the semester.
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This is one reason why the NDPA has been such a formidable force for due process and against Government human rights abuses and “bad law.”
It also shows why more and more immigration and immigration clinical professors are not only receiving tenure, but are “moving up the leadership ladder” at their institutions.
Immigration law teaching has been far, far ahead of the curve in teaching “law you can use” and practical skills that not only spell success in legal practice but in all aspects of life. One of these is taking complex subjects and breaking them down into understandable terms and pieces that make sense and relate to human experience.
Is she the “Debbie Anker of Entertainment?” PHOTO: Mason Poole, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Hon. “Sir Jeffrey” S. Chase writes:
What a beautiful tribute to a true giant and hero. I can’t even begin to state the influence Debbie has had on me. But think of how many NDPA heroes out there are former students of hers, and how many immigration law clinics around the country relied on Debbie’s clinic at Harvard as its model. It’s impossible to overstate her impact.
Clinical Professor Deborah Anker LL.M. ’84, ‘one of the architects of modern refugee law’ and founder of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, moves to emerita status
By Debbie/HLS Correspondent, July 20, 2022
Credit: Kathleen Dooher
As Harvard Law School Clinical Professor Deborah Anker LL.M. ’84 moves to emerita status, she and her many students and colleagues can reflect on her formidable record of achievement — as a pioneer in the study of refugee and asylum law, the author of the seminal text on the subject, and a tireless advocate for the rights of refugees, particularly women and children. As her former student Molly Linhorst ’16 puts it — quoting a sentiment voiced by many of Anker’s admirers — “She’s the Beyoncé of asylum law.”
“As founding director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, Deborah Anker has played a pivotal role at Harvard Law School, not only by founding our clinic but in helping build our clinical program,” Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “Her work in the clinic enabled countless clients to enjoy freedom and escape persecution by remaining in the U.S., and she trained and inspired scores of other lawyers to work to those same ends.”
“Debbie wins the prize for tenacity in terms of standing up for refugee rights in America,” says James Hathaway, prominent international refugee law scholar and founding director of Michigan Law’s Program in Refugee and Asylum Law. “Literally nobody has fought the good fight as often as she has done. But she is also an intellectual trailblazer, having, in particular, developed a gender-inclusive understanding of refugee status, and having made the case for the alignment of American understandings of asylum with our international obligations. She truly is a hero.”
Groundbreaking scholarship and litigation
A pioneer in the development of clinical legal education in the immigration field, Anker joined the Harvard Law faculty in the early ’80s, as a lecturer on law and later clinical professor of law in 2008. Along with her colleagues Nancy Kelly and John Wilshire-Carrera, Anker founded the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, or HIRC, which has since become a model for similar clinics nationwide. Her book, “Law of Asylum in the United States,” first published in 1998 under the editorship of former student Paul Lufkin and now updated annually with a cadre of HLS student editors, remains the key authoritative text in the area. She also has authored numerous amicus curiae briefs in major refugee litigation, served as an expert witness before national and international fora, and helped draft national gender refugee guidelines.
Harvard Law Clinical Professor Sabrineh Ardalan ’02, Anker’s former student and the current faculty director of HIRC, credits its significant expansion over the decades to Anker’s “commitment to advocating for immigrants’ rights and dedication to responding to the evolving challenges facing immigrants and refugees in the U.S.”
In addition to the clinical work at Greater Boston Legal Services, overseen by Kelly and Willshire Carrera, “HIRC now includes two clinics, a student practice organization [SPO], and the Harvard Representation Initiative, which serves members of the Harvard community whose immigration status is at risk. In addition to the flagship Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic, there is now a Crimmigration Clinic, led and directed by Phil Torrey, which focuses on cutting-edge appellate and district court advocacy at the intersection of immigration and criminal law. And through the HLS Immigration Project, the student-practice organization, students can hit the ground running with hands-on immigration and refugee advocacy their 1L year,” said Ardalan. “Debbie built a team at HIRC that now supervises over 140 HLS students each year through the two clinics and SPO and in so doing, centered immigration and refugee law as a core component of HLS’s clinical program.”
Credit: Tsar Fedorsky Anker (left) in 2011 with HIRC students Gianna Borotto ’11 and Defne Canset Ozgediz ’11, and Sabrineh Ardalan ’02. Ardalan is Anker’s former student and the current faculty director of HIRC.
Committed to justice from an early age
Raised in New York, Anker graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University, and went on to earn her J.D. from Northeastern before continuing her legal studies at Harvard. Even before she began formal studies, Anker was invested in the study of and advocacy for human rights. She credits that in large part to her family history and values: Her Jewish grandparents crossed the Atlantic to escape the persecution leading to the Holocaust, and both of her parents were committed public school educators. Her father was a New York City Schools chancellor during desegregation. “The belief in the equality of all people was central to how I was raised,” she said.
“From my family I got deep beliefs and commitment to anti-racism. I have a strong memory of my father telling me about Ralph Bunche, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, one of the founders of the United Nations, leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and U.S. civil rights movement, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” said Anker. According to her father, Anker reports, Bunche was discriminated in obtaining housing, and refused membership in a neighboring tennis club in the area of Queens where Anker’s family moved in her early teenage years. “That was something that stuck with me,” she said. Early in her legal career, Anker represented a Black family that had moved into Dorchester during desegregation and was subject to violent attacks; this was one of the cases covered in J. Anthony Lukas’ classic 1985 book, “Common Ground.” “For me personally, a commitment to racial justice was central to my identity,” she says.
Anker credits the late Harvard Law School public interest professor Gary Bellow ’60, founder and former faculty director of Harvard Law School’s clinical programs, with advising, advocating and paving the way for her engagement in clinical education at the law school.
She also credits the ‘extraordinary determination and integrity’ of Lisa Dealy, former assistant dean of clinical education, with whom Anker worked closely, in helping to expand the school’s clinical program.
In 1984, when Anker, along with Kelly and Willshire Carrera founded the Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic, the study of immigration law was still in its infancy, and clinical education was relatively new in legal education.
And, according to Kelly, Anker was writing the law from the beginning. “The article she co-authored on the legislative history of the Refugee Act [and] shaped how that law would be interpreted, with the U.S. Supreme Court citing it in support of an internationalist approach to refugee and asylum law, grounded in our treaty obligations, as signatories to the U.N. Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees,” said Kelly. “She authored some of the first empirical studies of immigration adjudication and co-authored the first study of the expedited removal process for addressing the claims of asylum seekers at the U.S. border.”
According to Willshire Carrera, Anker “believes in bringing the reality of the law as it is experienced by real people into the classroom and into scholarship. We developed an approach of ‘legal change from the bottom up,’ changing ground-level legal institutions, which set the stage for changes at higher levels, including in precedent decisions in the federal courts.” From its earliest years, HIRC worked to bring administrative decision-making out of the shadows, publishing administrative asylum decisions, which were otherwise inaccessible to advocates and researchers.
During these early years, Anker also worked with Hathaway, who developed a structured human rights approach to interpretation of refugee law, an approach HIRC would adopt including in much of its women’s refugee work.
Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer Anker (pictured here in 2014) with (from left) Julina Guo ’14, John Wilshire Carrera, and Nancy Kelly. Wilshire Carrera and Kelly founded the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic with Anker in 1984.
Anker’s background in racial justice led her to work with Haitian refugees beginning in the mid 1980s. “I got to know civil rights lawyer Ira Kurzban, who was leading the charge on behalf of Haitian refugees fleeing a horrible and violent dictatorship, which the U.S. had backed.” Among other work, Kurzban engaged Anker as an expert witness on U.S. asylum law, in challenges he brought based on discriminatory detention and treatment generally of Haitian refugees. She would continue to be called in as an expert, including later in challenges brought by Canadian NGOs in 2005 and 2017 to exclusionary policies of the Canadian government, refusing entry to asylum seekers coming from the U.S. under the Safe Third Country Agreement.
The Canadian Supreme Court will soon issue a ruling on whether the Canadian policy of returning asylum seekers to the U.S. complies with the Canadian Charter and international law. Canadian attorney Andrew Bouwer praised Anker’s work on the Safe Third Country Agreement and says he looks forward to her continued advocacy on these issues. “Professor Anker is a force of nature! Working with her on Canada-US border issues, especially the inhumane Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, these past 17 years has been an incredible honor and a highlight of my practice.”
Also in the 1980s, Anker helped found the Boston Committee against Deportation, defending a group of Haitians who were arrested by immigration authorities as they attempted to organize a union at Faneuil Hall market place.
HIRC continued this work with Haitian refugees who fled again during the 1990s after the violent overthrow of Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. HIRC’s early engagement with Haitian refugees led to groundbreaking work on gender asylum. “After President Aristide was deposed, there were security forces who went into women’s houses (the men had mostly fled) and raped them, because they were known, or assumed to be, supporters of Aristide,” explained Anker. “So it was really rape used as punishment based on ‘political opinion,’ one of the grounds of protection in the refugee treaty to which the U.S. is a party.”
Working in conjunction with other groups, HIRC got the administrative Board of Immigration Appeals to recognize that this was a form of what the agency called “grievous harm,” which HIRC argued fit the concept of persecution. “This case, Matter of D.V., was the first administrative gender asylum decision; along with others, we were able to convince the board to publish it as a precedent decision,” said Anker.
Meanwhile, the group traveled to Haiti to collect affidavits; their work ultimately led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to make the first finding by an international human rights body that rape could constitute torture.
This in turn contributed to greater global awareness of violence against women within a human rights framework. Canadian NGOs and academics took the lead, particularly through the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. “The Canadians worked up an amazing series of guidelines, and we [the HIRC] took those and adapted them to American law,” Anker said. “We published these and asked the U.S. government to take our guidelines and issue official government guidelines, based on them — and in fact, they did that.” Later, HIRC led a major amicus effort, drafting a brief to the then-attorney general signed by 187 organizations and individuals, arguing that violence against women in the “domestic” sphere, that is, in the home by sexual intimates, could be the basis for protection. Eventually the attorney general reversed an original denial and the petitioner, represented by the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, was granted asylum.
(HIRC was) committed to having legal education grounded in actual clients’ experiences of persecution. … We set a precedent that law school clinics are not just a place to do policy work or major litigation, but also a place to engage with clients, to get to know them and to help them articulate their experiences. … I am grateful to the law school for allowing us to advance that approach to legal advocacy and education.
Deborah Ankernone
Personal involvement became key in Anker’s approach to teaching. “We were committed to having legal education grounded in actual clients’ experiences of persecution. Students represented clients and learned to help them tell their stories. We then gave them the time to reflect in class and to write about it. We set a precedent that law school clinics are not just a place to do policy work or major litigation, but also a place to engage with clients, to get to know them, and to help them articulate their experiences,” said Anker. “I am grateful to the law school for allowing us to advance that approach to legal advocacy and education. We now have such a rich and diverse clinical education program at the law school, which has developed in many different directions – client work, policy advocacy, regulatory reform, as well as litigation.”
Anker also points to the clinic’s work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to develop general guidelines for international refugee law.
“My perception was that few academics and major practitioners around that time, the mid to late 1990’s, were thinking conceptually about this. Jim Hathaway’s work was a major force in bringing a principled, and importantly structured, human rights approach to interpretation of refugee law,” said Anker. “We got the UNHCR to adopt general guidelines recognizing gender itself as a category of protection within the refugee treaty’s ‘particular social group’ ground. In the amicus work we have done over the years, we have stuck to this approach and increasingly federal courts as well as some administrative decision makers are recognizing that gender itself can be a basis for protection, including in the ground-breaking 2020 First Circuit decision in De Pena-Paniagua v.Barr, which directly adopted language from HIRC’s lead amicus brief.”
HIRC has continued to expand its scope, working in recent years with students who were eligible for DREAM Act protection. Most recently, Anker and the group have worked on climate change and refugee law, pushing for interpretations of the law to account for the large-scale climate-based displacement that is already occurring in Central America and is expected to worsen. “We need to show decision makers and policy makers that displacement is caused by multitudes of factors and a person can qualify for protection if part of the cause is environmental,” said Anker.
“Our work has always been informed by what is happening,” Kelly said. “The gender work came from a sense of, ‘Where are the women in this system? They don’t seem to be represented’. The Haiti work was geared toward what happened to Haitian women after the coup in 1991. That brought the reality home of what was happening to Haitian women, and got that recognized in a legal context that could then be brought back to cases in the US. The two are integrally connected.”
“We pride ourselves on doing work from the ground up,” Willshire Carrera said. “We’ve had a large number of students who have gone on to be major contributors in the development of asylum law in the country. One thing for sure is that the clinic is now very well recognized. So much of that has to do with Debbie.”
Former students pay tribute
Ardalan, who now directs HIRC, acknowledges a significant personal influence. “Debbie has shaped the course of my life. I have learned so much from her advocacy and scholarship, from her empathy in working with clients, from her tremendous care for her students and colleagues, and from her incredible persistence in continuing to fight against injustice no matter what the odds. She has modeled for me how to approach teaching and lawyering with dedication, humility, strength, and compassion.”
Anker’s influence also goes far beyond Harvard Law School. According to Mark Fleming ’97, who studied with her at Harvard Law and is now a partner at WilmerHale, “Debbie’s contribution to how young lawyers thought about immigration law really can’t be overstated. She was the first person I met at HLS who was not only a gifted academic, but devoted to using her knowledge to represent clients. She used her knowledge to manage a significant group of people who were trying to push immigration law in a good direction and to help people who needed it. That was a new thing to me.”
Fleming currently does pro bono work in the immigration field and cites this as an example of Anker’s influence. “One of the more important lessons she taught me is that immigrants who come to our country are thrown into a very complicated system without anybody to help them. She showed me that things immediately change when a lawyer shows up, so a pro bono lawyer can make an enormous difference.” This, he said, goes back to his days at Harvard Law. “As a law student, the opportunity to walk down the street, to what used to be called Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services, had an impact. First of all, it was terrifying, because I had no idea what to do. But also very rewarding, because people in the system are otherwise forced to navigate it by themselves.”
“Debbie’s seminar influenced the way I think about asylum,” said Fatma Marouf ’02, who now directs the Immigration Rights Clinic at Texas A&M University School of Law. “The way she talked about absorbing each person’s story, I never forgot that. She walked us through each element of her incredible text about the law of asylum, and made sure we had a great understanding of it. She helped us connect the cases we were working on with the thinking behind it. And I loved that she really got in an international perspective — not just U.S. asylum law but how the U.K., Canada, Australia might approach it.”
Marouf particularly credits Anker with emphasizing the connection between asylum and human rights law. “When I teach my own clinic I talk about the importance of bringing in a comparative perspective of what asylum should be, versus how it is — and that’s all Debbie’s. I don’t know if I could have gone into immigration law without her, much less fallen in love with teaching.”
Credit: Brooks Kraft
“She built a program at a time when immigration clinics were not found at many law schools,” said David B. Thronson ’94, who went on to teach international human rights law at Michigan State University. “Part of what impressed me from the beginning is that her work is absolutely compelling and consequential; it changes peoples’ lives. You’re talking about people who are going to face persecution in their home countries if they are returned. It’s not an equal fight, the stakes and the consequences are high and their resources are often minimal; the government is always well represented but the migrant seldom is. To find someone with Debbie’s expertise and willingness to take on those issues — and who is also a tremendously human person that you can get to know — makes a huge difference, and it was a really defining law-school experience for me.”
That experience stuck with Thronson through his career. “I got the realization that things could go together; I could be a professor and still make a difference in the real world, representing clients — and hopefully I can do that in a way that lets my students grow and have good experiences. Debbie taught me that those aren’t mutually exclusive things to do.”
Another former student, Rebecca Sharpless ’94, now directs the immigration clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. “Debbie was the single most influential professor during my time at HLS. As I started my first year, I knew that I wanted to be a social justice lawyer, but I didn’t know what kind. Debbie taught me the urgency and importance of working with immigrants. Her work on some of the most difficult issues relating to the protection of refugees has been pathbreaking, but to me she is first and foremost a teacher and mentor. Under her guidance, I argued in immigration court, organized a trip to Miami to help Haitian refugees, and contributed to federal court briefing. Without a doubt, she made me into the immigration lawyer and teacher that I am today.”
Looking back on a lifetime of impact
Anker has been designated a Woman of Justice by the Massachusetts Bar Association, and in 2011 was elected as a fellow to the American Bar Foundation. The HIRC’s Women’s Refugee Project, which spearheaded work on gender asylum, received the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s (AILA) most prestigious “Founders Award.” HIRC also received AILA’s Human rights award for its work in clinical legal education and advocacy on behalf of refugees. Anker has received AILA’s Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award; two awards for gender asylum work from the Federal Bar Association; the Massachusetts Governor’s New American Appreciation Award; and the CARECEN Award from the Central American Refugee Center.
Presenting her with the latter honor, lead attorney Patrick Young called Anker “one of the architects of modern refugee law. She really defined the field from its inception and her essays and her seminal treatise, ‘Law of Asylum in the United States,’ have helped educate and train two generations of asylum lawyers. Without her thoughtful guidance, it is doubtful CARECEN and many other refugee defense programs could have succeeded in protecting the persecuted as effectively as we have.”
In addition to those already mentioned, Anker notes that “HIRC and I are so fortunate to have on staff attorneys Sameer Ahmed, Jason Corral, Tiffany Lieu, Mariam Liberles and Cindy Zapata. HIRC’s staff also includes our head of social work, Liala Buoniconti; paralegal Karina Buruca; Mary Hewey; and Anna Weick, our chief administrator.” Anker credits her faculty assistant, Sophie Jean, as being an incredible resource, organizing work on “Law of Asylum” research with students, among other invaluable assistance. “Not much can be accomplished without her amazing intelligence and commitment, and of course thank you to those who have come and gone like the incomparable Jordana Arias, a force of nature, and all my assistants going way back to wonderful Delona Wilkins.”
In entering emerita status, Anker reflects back with much gratitude at the opportunities she has been given. “I love this community and I love this work. It truly has been an honor. I am so very grateful.”
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Thanks and many congrats, Debbie, my long-time friend, for all you have done for due process, justice, humanity, and the future generations of the “New Due Process Army!” I wholeheartedly concur in the comments of my friend and Round Table colleague “Sir Jeffrey!” Through your intellectual brilliance, moral courage, extraordinary leadership, and ability to teach and inspire others, you have certainly left a permanent mark on the worldwide, eternal quest for justice!
Associate Provost/Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic/Professor of the Practice Laila L. Hlass Tulane Law
Laila, my friend, everywhere I look you’re making news! Here’s Dan Kowalski @ LexisNexis on Layla’s well-deserved Lisa Brodyaga Award from the National Immigration Project:
Laila was a “guest lecturer” in my Refugee Law and Policy class during her time as a Fellow at the CALS Asylum Clinic at Georgetown Law. Since then, I have “returned the favor” by traveling to Tulane Law, both virtually and in person, to speak to Laila’s class and other immigration events. Laila has been recognized for “putting Tulane Law on the map” for innovative practical scholarship in immigration and international human rights and excellence in clinical teaching. No wonder she carries a “string of titles” at Tulane Law!
Laila is also one of many exciting examples of how clinical immigration and human rights professors have not only moved into the “academic mainstream” at major American law schools, but have been recognized as leaders and innovators by the larger academic communities in which they serve. Immigration law teaching has come a long way since the late INS General Counsel Charlie Gordon’s Immigration Law Class at Georgetown was the “only game in town.” (Historical trivia note: My good friend the late BIA Judge Lauri Filppu and I “aced” Charlie’s class in 1974, thus “besting” our then-supervisor at the BIA. That could have been a “career limiting” move. But, we both ended up on the “Schmidt Board” in the 1990s.)
Many congrats, Laila, on an already amazing career with even more achievements and recognition in your future. Thanks for being such a brilliant, inspiring, and dynamic role model for the New Due Process Army!
GW Law Immigration Clinic Director Professor Alberto Benítez & Co-Director Paulina Vera
Professor Alberto Benitez at the GW Immigration Clinic reports:
Friends,
Our friend, colleague, and alum Paulina Vera shared this story. Congratulations Daniel!
“A current Immigration Judge shared that he spoke to his colleague, another Immigration Judge (“IJ”), about a recent virtual hearing handled by student-attorney, Daniel Fishelman ’22. IJ complimented the Clinic’s preparation and Daniel’s performance, stating that even though it was for a short matter, she was impressed by the Clinic. This was the Clinic’s first appearance before IJ. Please join us in congratulating Daniel on completing his first hearing and getting positive feedback from Immigration Judges!”
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Many congrats to student-attorney, Daniel Fishelman ’22 on his first engagement as a member of the NDPA!👍🏼😎
Also, congrats to my friends and “due process role models” Alberto and Paulina! So proud that part of Paulina’s “immigration justice journey” went through the Arlington Immigration Court, where she served as an intern.
Alberto and Paulina tell me that after their “standard rigorous prep session” with Daniel, he definitely was “QRFPT” — “Quite Ready For Prime Time!” 😎 That’s as opposed to “NQRFPT” (“Not Quite Ready For Prime Time”) ☹️ — something to be avoided in Immigration Court or any other type of litigation!☠️
This case illustrates what I found on the bench: that “short cases” are almost always the result of superior scholarship, meticulous preparation, and informed dialogue by counsel for both parties before getting to court.
That’s why one grossly underutilized tool for reducing backlogs is investing in and encouraging more and better trained representation for individuals appearing in Immigration Court.
As statistics have shown time after time, universalrepresentation is also the key to achieving high appearance rates.
Additionally, constructing court dockets and scheduling cases locally with input from both counsel is a way of reversing the backlog building “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) produced by attempting to manage dockets from “on high.” ADR usually results from EOIR unilaterally attempting to satisfy DHS enforcement aims or to accommodate “disconnected political agendas and ill-advised gimmicks” generated by DOJ and White House politicos — invariably clueless about the realities of Immigration Court practice!
The three things always left behind by ADR: due process, fundamental fairness, and practical efficiency!
Elizabeth Keyes Associate Professor Director, Immigrant Rights Clinic U of Baltimore Law Photo: U of Baltimore Law Website
Friends,
I have the best job in the legal profession. Maybe this could be your best job in the legal profession.
I’m excited to share a hiring announcement for the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at University of Baltimore, which has been my own beloved position for the last decade. (I’m staying at UBalt, but shifting to purely doctrinal teaching for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with how much I love our clinical program and community at UBalt). We are looking for a dynamic junior or pre-tenure lateral person for this position.
As you probably know, UBalt is an exceptionally good place to be a clinician. We are on a unitary tenure-track, with case coverage over the breaks. Our clinicians lead the law school in all kinds of ways, from committee-leadership to scholarship and beyond. We also have a beautifully collegial clinical faculty, with weekly brown-bag lunches focused on everything from pedagogy to workshopping our own scholarship. In the next four weeks alone, we have one lunch devoted to the pedagogy of Bell Hooks, another on clinics and emergency response, and another workshopping two articles by our teaching fellows. We have a lot of independence within our clinics, but we also share the same deep roots in non-directive, client-centered pedagogy.
Please share the announcement widely with your networks.
Warmly,
Liz
Elizabeth Keyes
Associate Professor, Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic
University of Baltimore School of Law
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Great opportunity for an up and coming NDPA “practical scholar!”
Professor Erin Barbato Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic UW Law Photo source: UW Law
ARD, BARBATO, AND COLLINS NAMED UW LAW SCHOOL TEACHERS OF THE YEAR
Each spring, UW Law School celebrates excellence in teaching through its Teacher of the Year awards. UW Law School’s annual teaching awards demonstrate the value placed on excellent teaching. Our faculty engage and inspire UW Law students through thoughtful pedagogy, and we are proud to honor them for this important work.
The honorees for outstanding classroom, clinical and adjunct instruction in 2020 include:
BJ Ard, Classroom Teacher of the Year. BJ Ard is an Assistant Professor of Law whose teaching and scholarship focusing on intellectual property, privacy, and technology. Ard earned his law degree and doctorate from Yale in 2017. He joined the UW Law School in 2018.
Erin M. Barbato, Clinical Teacher of the Year. Barbato is the director of UW Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic (IJC) and a Clinical Professor of Law. In 2013, she joined the Law School as an adjunct professor with a focus on immigration law before becoming the IJC director in 2018. Under her supervision, students learn how to represent individuals in removal proceedings and with humanitarian-based immigration relief. Barbato received her law degree from Marquette University Law School in 2006.
Susan Collins, Adjunct Teacher of the Year. Collins teaches an introduction for estate planning and drafting. Collins earned her law degree in 1995, graduating cum laude from UW Law. Collins worked for Associated Bank as a senior vice president and fiduciary law senior counsel until 2018.
Congratulations, Erin, my friend and colleague So very proud of you and all you have achieved at my alma mater. “Badgers changing the world, for the better!”
Bucky Badger UW Mascot
This is a “Big Deal!” As Erin tells me:
The award is based on votes and comments from students. It means a lot to me as I think it reflects that the students of UW Law recognize the importance of representing people in removal proceedings. They are future due process warriors.
Erin has been an inspirational role model for a new generation of law students, taking groups to the border to save lives, engaging in “retail level” litigation in Immigration Court that advances justice in the most meaningful way possible, and publicizing the seminal role that immigrant justice plays in social justice in America. She is also a thinker and scholar who sees due process, human rights, and racial justice issues with a clarity lacking in all too many of today’s out of touch politicians, policy makers, and judges.
Erin also was a guest lecturer in my Immigration Law & Policy course course at Georgetown Law. Her “stories and pictures from the border” brought home to my students the gross violations of human and constitutional rights going on in our dysfunctional Immigration Courts on a daily basis.
Erin is one of the many “practical scholars” out there who should be “on the inside” at EOIR, DHS, and the Article III Courts!
A few “takeaways” from one of America’s leading “practical scholars:”
Think about a new start with a “clean slate;”
Deportation is “state violence;”
Immigration Courts are constructed to provide Gov. with an unfair advantage;
No rules, no due process, no justice;
Kudos to the NDPA & the Round Table;
Trump Administration spent inordinate effort improperly skewing the law to insure everything is denied and remove equible discretion from IJs;
Good provisions that provided discretion in the past to alleviate hardship and injustice have been eliminated by Congress: suspension of deportation, JRAD, 212(c), 245(i), registry (not repealed but now virtually useless b/c of 1972 cutoff date).
Click at the above link for a full job description and instructions on how to apply. This would be a super opportunity for an experienced member of the New Due Process Army who wants to enter the field of clinical instruction or for those who are already teaching and would like to move to Charlottesville and become associated with one of the nation’s top law school!
Thanks to Professor Alberto Benitez of the GW Law Immigration Clinic for passing this along!
