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Preparation For Meaningful Careers: A Decade of the Immigration Law Clinic
Ten years ago, Professors Veronica and David Thronson came to Michigan State University College of Law with the charge of starting a new clinical program. It wasn’t David’s first time developing an immigration law clinic; he’d founded the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ clinic at the William S. Boyd School of Law, often working in tandem with Veronica in her role as the directing attorney of the Domestic Violence Project at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.
As clinic co-founders at MSU, the team wanted to build a program tailored to the needs of the mid-Michigan community, rather than replicating the UNLV clinic.
“We really didn’t know about the range of immigration services that existed in Michigan, and we researched what kind of needs exist here,” said Veronica. “But David was never concerned that we wouldn’t have clients: based on experience with the lack of accessible legal representation for vulnerable immigrants, he was confident that ‘if you build it, they will come’.” He was quickly proven correct: only a few weeks passed between their arrival in East Lansing to bringing their first clients through the door. They hit the ground running – and haven’t stopped since.
SEEKING OUT THE HARD CASES
The very first Immigration Law Clinic students welcomed their first clients into the original MSU Law Clinic, a below-ground space on Grand River Avenue that smelled like the Chipotle restaurant next door and pulsed with classic rock beats from the used record store upstairs. The next clinic building, a newly renovated commercial space on Abbott Road, would provide a comparatively sedate environment in which to meet and interview clients. Finally, in summer 2017, the MSU Law Clinic settled into its current home in the heart of the Law College Building: on the second floor, in a space carved out from the law library. While the location of the Immigration Law Clinic has changed over the past decade, its mission has remained constant.
Initially, the Immigration Law Clinic worked on a referral basis through community service organizations. From the beginning, David and Veronica sought out particularly challenging cases – people whose unique needs fell outside of the purview of legal aid agencies and those who lacked the financial means to hire an attorney. Without the no-cost direct representation offered by the clinic, most of their clients would face the increasingly consolidated and opaque immigration bureaucracy without any legal support.
Their clients are often incredulous when they learn that their representation is free. “I tell them no, they don’t need to pay us,” said Veronica. “The students pay us to have a chance to learn this.”
The clinic has provided services to hundreds of clients, the majority of whom lack legal immigration status and face deportation if they are unable to prove that they have a legal right to remain. They include survivors of human trafficking and domestic abuse, members of persecuted religious and political groups, victims of unspeakable violence, and unaccompanied children.
For several years, the clinic was contracted to represent every child placed in Michigan by the Office of Refugee Resettlement: they either represented the children themselves or placed them with attorneys who volunteered pro bono services.
LEARNING THROUGH SERVICE
While helping their clients secure legal residency status is central to the Immigration Law Clinic’s mission, Veronica, who now directs both the Immigration Law Clinic and the MSU Law Clinic, is equally committed to instilling an ethos of service in future lawyers.
The work is demanding. A single asylum case can require months of interviewing the client, working with interpreters, filing paperwork, briefing, gathering evidence, developing expert testimony, and conducting the trial.
If a student wants to go to court, Veronica can usually find a way to make that happen; in a given semester, students represent their clients in immigration courts, family courts, and federal courts of appeal.
The clinic has built a reputation for thoroughly readying its students to appear in court, and the preparation is exhaustive. For example, in spring of 2019, the clinic staged a dress rehearsal for an upcoming hearing in the College of Law’s moot courtroom so that the students and client would know exactly what to expect.
“I don’t want them to have a fear of appearing in immigration court for the first time without ever having seen it,” said Veronica; she also requires students to observe court sessions.
Just as important as gaining practice skills, they learn to listen (often through an interpreter) to the stories of their clients and to tailor their approaches to the clients’ individual situations. These challenging – and often heartbreaking – cases teach students that every client is worthy of respect and deserving of skillful, empathetic counsel.
Though clinical faculty won’t allow students to fail their clients, clinic students are given an exceptional amount of ownership over their cases. They’re expected to learn quickly, demonstrate initiative, and rise to the occasion.
“They develop these skills to argue in front of judges and they know that when you’re representing a client in immigration matters, there are huge stakes,” said Veronica. “We want to make sure they know that this is your client, and we make them think about what kind of attorneys they are going to be.”
For many second- and third-year law students, it’s the first time they’ve ever undertaken a project so expansive, or so consequential. It’s often their first exposure to the life-changing power that they, as lawyers, can exercise on behalf of their clients.
A POWERFUL EXPERIENCE
Over the past decade, the reach of the Immigration Law Clinic has exceeded the immediate footprint of its practice. The clinic has developed a reputation for launching its grads into immigration practice all over the country, and their previous teaching fellows have gone on to helm clinics at other universities: at the University of Arkansas, the University of Illinois, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Because of this far-reaching network, the MSU Law Immigration Law Clinic has assisted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of clients who will never set foot in East Lansing: the many people ably served by clinic graduates and fellows. Because of the experiences that their lawyers had in the Immigration Law Clinic, those immigrants will be able to work, engage fully in society, and contribute to their communities without living in fear of deportation.
But Veronica is quick to point out that the program’s true impact on the community and the legal profession extends far beyond training the two dozen or so immigration law practitioners who built their skills under her supervision. Immigration law, she observed, is a niche field, and most of her students will undertake practice in other areas. She hopes that their clinic experiences will inspire them to take on pro bono work throughout their legal careers.
Whatever practice areas they choose, Veronica believes that they will benefit from the powerful lessons in client service and empathy that they learned in the Immigration Law Clinic.
“The students work on these high stakes cases and they learn how to represent clients: if you are able to represent a child through an interpreter in front of various court systems, if you get services or secure relief for a client who has been traumatized by severe sexual assault, if you help clients navigate the insane bureaucracy of immigration agencies, you are able to handle any cases that your practice will bring you,” said Veronica. “We are giving students transferable skills that they can go on to use in family law, in criminal law, in corporate law.”