Meet the Fellows: Reflections on an unfair system
The 2024 Justice Fellows — our largest class of Fellows yet — will soon join their host organizations, working to provide quality legal counsel to immigrants in need.
Below, we have highlighted six of the 2024 Fellows who shared their thoughts on the U.S. immigration system.
The immigration system is complex and procedurally very strict. It is entirely unfair to expect a nonlawyer to handle it entirely on their own when the stakes can be life threatening or altering.
Nicole Carter
Community Immigration Law Center
University of Minnesota School of Law
The U.S. immigration system and its laws are, to put it mildly, broken and designed to discourage entry to the country. Experienced attorneys have difficulty understanding these laws, so I think it is a violation of due process and inhumane to expect newly arrived immigrants to confront the system alone.
Jonathan Eduardo Escobar Valencia
Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project
University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
I think how the immigration system treats immigrants, asylum seekers, and generally desperate people on the margins, says a lot about how we allocate the value of human life and human suffering. Legal representation for immigrants is a basic human right.
Geovanna Medel
ABA Fund for Justice and Education Immigration Justice Project
University of California, Davis School of Law
With the arcane, byzantine nature of the American immigration system, it is impossible to expect a person to adequately avail themselves of their full rights within that system nor put forward their case in a way that will maximize their chances of receiving a just outcome.
Derek Potts
Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic
Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law
Our immigration system, as it stands, is adversarial and re-traumatizes those who are forced to endure it. Migration is a human right, and it is important that immigrants have a passionate and competent team of professionals who treat every component of their humanity.
Destiny Taylor
PAIR Project
Northeastern University School of Law
The immigration system is so complex and announces new policies so frequently that it is difficult for highly educated people to stay up to date, let alone your everyday person.
Virginia Vanegas
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center
University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law
