Under the Trump administration, immigration law and policy have been at the forefront of our national consciousness. We have seen the images of attorneys on laptops clustered around the electrical outlets at airports in response to the travel bans, and videos of children pleading with authorities to allow their undocumented parents to stay in the country. But what is it like to be an attorney working to advocate on behalf of immigrants and refugees? I spoke with two attorneys to find out.<\/p>\n
Isabelle Paine Thacker is an attorney with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)<\/a> field office in Albany, NY. USCRI Albany is a resettlement agency that provides refugees placed in the Albany area with a variety of services related to housing, medical care, employment, and access to English classes. Throughout her career, Thacker has provided legal services to disadvantaged populations, such as domestic violence survivors and people living in poverty. <\/em><\/p>\n Q: Could you tell me about USCRI Albany and how you came to work for them?<\/p>\n A: USCRI has been around for over 100 years. It\u2019s a network of agencies across the country serving refugees, immigrants, survivors of human trafficking and unaccompanied immigrant children. I was running the legal program at a domestic violence agency in Newton, and my family was moving to the Albany area. I wanted to do immigration work. The legal program here serves refugees and other immigrants to help them apply for citizenship. We also do a lot of green card applications [for permanent residency], family reunification applications, and travel documents for refugees.<\/p>\n Q: What is a typical day like for you?<\/p>\n A: As with most non-profits, every day is different. There are two hats that I wear: one is working with refugees and their cases, and the other is the citizenship project through the Office of New Americans. You really need to know your clients. You sit down with them, go through their questions, and lay out the issues and what the potential problems are and the length of time it\u2019s going to take. Everything seems to be moving much more slowly now\u2014people might have relief, but the resources haven\u2019t been spent on processing the immigration applications so that people can get relief. It has been much more focused on enforcement now.<\/p>\n Q: Could you tell me about how the election and President Trump\u2019s executive orders have affected both people\u2019s feelings and perceptions of the immigration process, and the concrete legal changes?<\/p>\n A: I started in mid-September, so I have a very small pre-election period to judge it by. But I think the election was scary for our clients. Right after the election, and then once the executive orders came down, I got a lot of phone calls from people who were afraid, and didn\u2019t know whether they should travel, or whether they would be able to get their family members here\u2026<\/p>\n At first it was hard to know whether it was anecdotal or actually true, but there was a feeling of ramped up ICE presence and ICE detaining people right from the beginning. We had one client detained right before Thanksgiving and released right before Christmas. She was a US citizen, although we didn\u2019t know that at the time, and neither did she. We had to prove it to the ICE agent [by tracking down documentation from her deceased mother.] The ICE agent said to us, \u201cwe had eight years of not being able to do our jobs, and now we\u2019re going to do our jobs.\u201d They feel more emboldened, I would say. Now the priorities [for detainment and removal] are so broad and many more people are being detained\u2026 The Albany office doesn\u2019t work with undocumented people because we just don\u2019t have the resources. So the people we\u2019re seeing are documented, and they\u2019re scared. For undocumented people, the fear is much greater.<\/p>\n Q: Tell me about your previous jobs and what led you to go into immigration.<\/p>\n A: The summer after my 1L year, I worked for Farmworker Legal Services of North Carolina, and I loved it. When I worked for Georgia Legal Services right after law school in the Georgia mountains, the Hispanic population was starting to grow as people moved in to do poultry processing. I did a little bit of immigration work then. I\u2019ve always really liked immigration work. I love puzzles, and that\u2019s what immigration is. I kept doing a little bit of immigration while focusing on state law issues, like domestic violence or housing. When I got to New York, I thought it would be easier to learn more immigration law than to start with the basics of New York state law.<\/p>\n I like working with my clients. Immigrants and refugees are so resilient and so determined. I don\u2019t know that I would succeed as a refugee.<\/p>\n The language capacity that so many of my clients have\u2014it\u2019s amazing how many languages they speak! I speak Spanish and English, and the alphabet is the same in both.<\/p>\n Q: Did you always know you wanted to work for a non-profit or legal services provider, or did you ever consider working for a firm? What suggestions do you have for students who are currently making that decision?<\/p>\n A: If you\u2019re at Harvard, you\u2019re lucky if you want to work at a non-profit, because there is loan assistance after a certain number of years. I went to the University of North Carolina and was able to be in-state after a year, so I graduated with no debt. Graduating with no debt or knowing that your debt will be forgiven if you go to work for a non-profit is a great luxury. You can follow your heart, and follow what you want to do.\u00a0 [That said,] there are a lot of firms that do a lot of great pro bono work, and encourage it, and that\u2019s needed too.<\/p>\n