‘Civil Rights Issue of Our Time’

Pacific News Service

SAN FRANCISCO—A Vietnamese man facing deportation because of a 15-year-old crime for which he already served time is finding an unlikely ally in a Russian immigrant here. Yulia Garteiser, a third-year law student at Stanford University, is one in a growing corps of law students who provide free legal services to immigrants, helping to plug an ever-gaping hole in the legal system across the U.S.

The effects of the clinics are being felt in Los Angeles, too. The Annenberg immigration-law clinic at USC’s campus just south of Downtown currently has five cases pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court, says director Niels Frenzen. The USC clinic has taken on 30 to 40 cases and won most of them—at least in initial rounds—giving students a new appreciation for immigration law.

“Students can see first-hand how their work might change how an immigration judge sees a case,” Frenzen says.

Jayashri Srikantiah who heads the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Stanford University, says the practical training offered by the clinics to students is as valuable as the assistance they in turn provide to clients who would otherwise walk into court with no legal preparation.

“It’s comparable to residents in hospitals who learn by doing,” Srikantiah says

The growing trend has Garteiser and like-minded law students meeting with clients, investigating cases, interviewing witnesses, preparing declarations, and even appearing in court. The need couldn’t be greater, according to Srikantiah.

“Immigration is the civil rights issue of our time,” she says (see related story on LAPD policy, above).

Only an estimated 42 percent of people involved in immigration proceedings have legal representation, according to recent data. The low numbers for legal representation stem partly from rules that do not require free public counsel for poor people appearing before an immigration judge—unlike criminal cases, where defendants without much money get a public defender.

Meanwile, many courts have seen immigration matters take up an increasing amount of their caseloads, with some as high as 40 percent. And immigrants still have relatively few places to go for pro bono—or free—legal advice and representation.

Reasons for the shortage can be traced to immigration law’s traditional niche as a specialty practice—a status that is only beginning to change, as large numbers of immigrants continue to arrive in states across the U.S., often landing in the court system on one charge or another. But the trend is clear to James Smith, who started an immigration clinic at UC Davis in 1981 to help asylum seekers fleeing wars in Central America. At the time it was one of the only clinics of its kind in the country. Now Smith estimates there are 30 to 40 such clinics nationwide, from California to North Carolina.

The first big spurt of immigration clinics followed an overhaul of immigration laws in 1996.

“It’s impossible to overstate [the] draconian impact” of the changes, Smith says. “It had the effect of railroading immigrants out of the country and severely truncated the authority of immigration judges to grant relief.”

Nancy Morawetz helped start an immigration clinic at New York University (NYU) in response to the 1996 law. The trend that started back then redoubled after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, she says.

The silver lining for immigrants has been the increasing interest of law students’ in immigation law.

Garteiser, for example, studied law in Russia before attending Stanford. But she had never done any immigration work.

“In the U.S. I saw how language prevented immigrants from accessing legal help,” she says.

Waiting lists to serve at immigration-law clinics around the country clearly demonstrate that Garteiser is not alone in her focus.

“We used to once drum the hallways to get 10 to 12 students,” says Smith, at the UC Davis clinic. “Now we are oversubscribed.”

The increasing prominence of immigration cases in the legal system also provides a boost.

“This is cutting-edge legal work,” says Morawetz, at the NYU clinic. “These are the most pressing issues of our day.”

The Stanford clinic’s Srikantiah says she hopes that a semester in the field working on real cases will stay with the students, even if they don’t make immigration law a full-time practice. That’s happening to some extent, with a number of alumni from NYU’s clinic now stocking organizations such as the ACLU and the National Immigrant Law Center.

Stanford’s Garteiser says she now wants to go into immigration law. Her classmate Sonya Sanchez, the first in her family to go to college, doesn’t know if public-interest law will be feasible, bringing in enough income to allow her to support her grandmother. But she says she is committed to doing some pro bono work regardless of where she lands professionally.

Sanchez says she felt the commitment when she interviewed her first client in a pro bono immigration case.

“She went out of her way to clean her house just because she was so happy someone was taking an interest in her,” says Sanchez. “I realized I was in a small way helping her regain some control of her life. I was glowing afterwards.”