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IMMIGRATION CENTER ON THE FRONT LINES
Beyond Borders: New Immigration Center Drives Progress
Ahilan Arulanantham Gabriela Domenzain Talia Inlender Hiroshi Motomura
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 fi elds 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.
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 fi eld, 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 fi nd ourselves in today.
Engaging with top offi cials in Washington is also a signature of the center. In March, Motomura testifi ed 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 Pacifi c 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 eff orts 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 eff ort 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.”
With the philanthropy world on the precipice of signifi cant change, UCLA Law has established the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofi ts, devoted to cutting-edge research, training, and policy in this dynamic and evolving area of the law and society. It will reside within the law school’s Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy (LMI). Th e new program builds on the vision of UCLA Law alumnus Lowell Milken ’73, who has utilized his own legal background to inform his work as both a businessman and a philanthropist. What forces will transform the world of philanthropy in the years ahead? As baby boomers pass on, expectations are that they will transfer tens of trillions of dollars in wealth to younger generations, well-established nonprofi ts, and/or family foundations. Th is massive fi nancial shift is set to upend the processes of philanthropy and the governance of nonprofi ts. Th e rise of new ways of conducting philanthropy and changes in the role of nonprofi ts in society places this issue closer still to the heart of the national political, legal, and social conversation. “Th e nonprofi t sector is undergoing an epochal shift, and lawyers will be at the center of this transformation,” says Professor Lowell Milken Jill Horwitz, a renowned authority in the law of nonprofi ts and the program’s inaugural faculty director. “UCLA Law and the Lowell Milken Institute now have the opportunity to lead the way in this especially relevant area.”
Horwitz, who holds the David Sanders Professorship in Law and Medicine at UCLA Law, recently served as the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofi t Organizations.
Since its founding in 2011, LMI has been home to UCLA Law’s business law and tax law programs, both of which are ranked in the top 10 nationally. Th e new program will serve UCLA Law students and all stakeholders in the nonprofi t sector, convening practitioners, donors, regulators, and those who run nonprofi ts. Initially, the program will focus on three main goals: Jill Horwitz 1. Become a research center that develops and shares scholarship and knowledge on issues relating to nonprofi ts, including tax policy, governance, and the role of nonprofi ts in developing and promoting social policies. Th is goal will provide resources to a wide range of participants in the nonprofi t sector, including policymakers, regulators, lawyers, and senior managers of nonprofi ts. 2. Develop and expand education at UCLA Law for students, lawyers, directors, and senior managers of nonprofi ts on issues that are central to nonprofi t operations, fi nancial management, and governance. 3. Support thought leadership on legal issues material to nonprofi ts so that the program serves as an important resource for the operation and governance of nonprofi ts and as a venue to bring together practitioners, scholars, and regulators.
“Lowell Milken brought this new law and philanthropy program concept to us, showing incredible foresight about generational wealth transfer,” says Joel Feuer, executive director of LMI.
“We are immensely grateful to Lowell Milken for his visionary gift,” says UCLA Law Dean Jennifer L. Mnookin. “Our outstanding UCLA Law faculty, especially in tax law, nonprofi t law, and the governance of entities, positions us to be a national resource for scholarship and policy analysis of the nonprofi t sector — and we can take a leadership role in the education of legal counsel, nonprofi t directors, and executives to meet the challenges that will shape nonprofi ts.”
Among the nation’s most eminent businessmen, philanthropists and leaders in education reform, Milken has donated more than $20 million to the law school during the past decade, including the $10 million gift, then the largest in the school’s history, that launched LMI in 2011. A new gift of $3.7 million has made the new Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofi ts possible.
“We’re undergoing a generational shift that promises to make some of the most signifi cant changes to the universe of business law and policy in decades,” Lowell Milken says. “Th ere is a rare and important chance to make an impact on a national scale, and the talent and vision of the people at UCLA Law and LMI make this an exciting and irresistible opportunity.”
