Legendary Immigration Lawyer
PHOTO: National Immigration Project
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/us/lisa-brodyaga-dead.html
Lisa Brodyaga, Crusading Lawyer for Immigrants’ Rights, Dies at 81
She became a folk hero representing asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America, setting up shop in the Rio Grande Valley and building a refuge camp.
By Alex Vadukul
Jan. 4, 2022
As leftist revolution and U.S.-backed counter-insurgencies spread through El Salvador and Guatemala in the early 1980s, Central America became awash in bloodshed, sending refugees fleeing to the United States border in hopes of a new life.
When they got there, a combative immigration lawyernamed Lisa Brodyaga, who had only recently passed the Texas bar exam, was waiting.
She was running Proyecto Libertad, a pro bono legal initiative in Texas representing asylum seekers, and by the decade’s end she had helped defend thousands in court. She went on to earn a reputation as a litigious thorn in the side of federal border enforcement agencies for the next 40 years.
“Lisa was a leader in a whole movement of lawyers who decided to approach the representation of immigrants with a civil rights consciousness,” said Susan Gzesh, an immigrant rights expert who teaches at the University of Chicago. “She helped firmly establish that undocumented asylum seekers have rights under our Bill of Rights. She taught immigration lawyers to not be afraid to go into federal courts.”
Ms. Brodyaga (pronounced brod-YA-ga) died on Oct. 28 at her home at a refuge camp she founded near San Benito, Texas. She was 81. The cause was lung cancer, her son, Paul Mockett Jr., said. Her death was not widely reported at the time.
Wearing her hair in a long single braid down her back, Ms. Brodyaga was known to show up at court wearing sandals or cowboy boots. If the federal prosecutors she faced smirked at first, it was because they were uninitiated. By lunch break they were often stepping outside to collect themselves after the verbal barrage Ms. Brodyaga had directed at them in defense of her client.
“I like to be underestimated,” she once told law students at the University of Miami. “I like to have people think, ‘She’s just a hick lawyer.’” She added: “Go ahead, I dare you. Dismiss me.”
In the mid-1980s, as war raged in El Salvador, members of the independent Human Rights Commission of El Salvador were imprisoned by the country’s government, and Ms. Brodyaga traveled there to check on their condition.
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Read the complete tribute/obit at the link!
“Go ahead, I dare you. Dismiss me.”
That’s something to which today’s talented, dedicated, grossly under-appreciated NDPA lawyers can relate!
As an elitist who never had to operate “in the trenches of immigration law,” AG Garland obviously takes your and your colleagues’ legitimate demands for long overdue radical EOIR reform, real practical immigration/human rights expertise, and potential judicial and administrative talent “for granted” as he “busies himself” with “more important things” and runs our immigrant justice and asylum systems even more deeply into the ground (a hard concept to grasp after four years of Sessions & Barr — but progressive advocates had better start looking at Garland in a “new Miller Lite” and acting accordingly).
It looks like the only way you are going to get Garland’s attention is to keep taking him and his error-prone, anti-immigrant, Trump-era-holdover BIA “to the cleaners” in Federal Court — in the mold of the late, great, Lisa B!
Many thanks to my good friend and NDPA warrior queen Deb Sanders, who’s cast in that same mold as Lisa, for alerting me to this article!
Here’s a previous Courtside post on Lisa:
🇺🇸Due Process Forever!
PWS
01-05-21