Beyond Borders: New Immigration Center Drives Progress
Ahilan Arulanantham
Gabriela Domenzain
In his 2020 law review article “The New Migration Law: Migrants, Refugees, and Citizens in an Anxious Age,” UCLA Law Distinguished Professor and immigration authority Hiroshi Motomura writes, “Once every generation or so, entire fields of law require a full reset. We need to step back from the fray and rethink basic premises, ask new questions, and even recast the role of law itself. This moment has come for the law governing migration." UCLA Law’s groundbreaking new Center for Immigration Law and Policy aims to help drive that necessary and important reset. The center launched in 2020 with a transformative gift from dedicated UCLA Law alumna and board of advisors chair Alicia Miñana ’87 and her husband, Rob Lovelace. A second, anonymous gift later doubled the center’s resources. Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and one of the most respected and broadly cited scholars in immigration law, came on to serve as its inaugural faculty director. The center got a further boost in 2021, when renowned advocate Ahilan Arulanantham joined from the ACLU of Southern California. He now serves as faculty co-director of the center and professor from practice. Arulanantham argued the case of FBI v. Fazaga before the U.S. Supreme Court in November (see story, page 59). The center's leadership team includes communications director Gabriela Domenzain, a longtime immigration advocate, and deputy director Talia Inlender, who previously worked at Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. Inlender will teach the Immigrants' Rights Policy Clinic with Motomura. The center’s work — which this year included a series of summits, clinical impact in the community, and continued robust scholarship — has now kicked into a higher gear that responds to the many challenges and opportunities in one of the most dynamic and debated areas of the law today. That approach is represented by a key component of the center’s work, the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, directed by Nina Rabin. Launched in 2019, the clinic provides legal services to students and their families at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown and is the nation’s only immigration law clinic on a K-12 public school campus. In the past year, the clinic has worked directly with hundreds of families while training dozens of law students. In January 2022, it will hold a clinic that will provide legal assistance to Afghan refugees settled in Los Angeles.
Talia Inlender
Hiroshi Motomura
The center has also organized a series of conferences to inform scholars, students, and the public on the rapidly shifting immigration law and policy landscape, and its real-life consequences. Last spring, its inaugural conference, “Immigration Policy in the Biden Administration: The First 100 Days and Beyond,” featured a number of conversations with leaders in the field, including sharp Q&A sessions with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Sen. Alex Padilla of California (see story, page 59). To launch the center’s fall conference, “The Road Ahead on Immigration Law,” Domenzain convened Univision Anchor Jorge Ramos and three of the nation’s most important DREAMer leaders for a candid conversation on the power of organizing and the moment we find ourselves in today. Engaging with top officials in Washington is also a signature of the center. In March, Motomura testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on anti-Asian violence (see story, page 41). More recently, he embarked on a project with six law student research assistants, with funding from the California state budget, to analyze how immigration laws and policies have disadvantaged Asian and Pacific Islander communities in California, with a policy report due in the spring of 2022, including recommendations for state law reform. Center staff members have also worked extensively behind the scenes to support legislative efforts to provide forms of legal status to people who hold Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who are recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or who are undocumented long-time residents of the United States. Arulanantham represents TPS holders in a legal challenge that seeks to preserve their status, an effort that has involved extensive negotiation over issues that overlap with the legislative process. “This work is particularly meaningful for the center because we are very interested in interrogating the role of race in immigration policy, and the litigation strategy challenging the Trump Administration’s attempt to terminate the TPS program focused in large part on the racist intent behind the Administration’s policy. It also is important to do this work at UCLA in particular, because the origins of DACA, the most meaningful deportation relief policy in recent times, stemmed from work by academics, activists, and students at UCLA and other UC campuses,” Arulanantham says. “The courage and imagination of those young activists continues to inspire our work.”
FALL 2021 | UCLA LAW MAGAZINE 11
