Fellow Story

Thinking outside the box - Natalie Eberts

Immigration attorneys often have to get creative when seeking relief for their clients within an unjust immigration system.

2023 Justice Fellow Natalie Eberts talks about how she thought outside the box to help a family apply for asylum.

Natalie is a Fellow at Esperanza Center of Catholic Charities of Baltimore.


One of my favorite parts about my job is trying to be “creative within a non-creative system” (source of quote unknown). For me, part of what this means is keeping my eyes wide open to finding immigration relief or benefits in ways I may not expect or for people I may not expect. 

A recent example is one of my clients, Maria.* She needs immigration relief, along with her several brothers and her parents, but she is the only one I am able to help directly, since she’s an unaccompanied child. The whole family fled Venezuela because the Venezuelan police were demanding bribes to allow the family to continue operating its business and when the family couldn’t pay the bribes, the police threatened to take the father to prison or to send a gang after the family. The facts and the story are basically the same for the other family members, and most of the asylum application would be similar. I am already writing a detailed statement about the police threats based on information from the mother, since the daughter, my client, did not know about the police threats at the time they happened, only her parents did. Could a mother be a derivative on a daughter’s asylum application? No, she could not, only a daughter on a mother’s application.

Finally, I realized that the mother could file her own asylum application, and that if the mother eventually received asylum, all of her children and her husband could receive asylum as well, as derivatives. We could use the statement regarding the police threats that I had already written for the daughter’s application as a starting point for the other family member’s statements, instead of having to start each one from scratch. With just a few more hours of work, five or six people could apply for asylum, rather than just one. The mother is working two jobs and had already paid a private attorney $1,000 out of $1,200 to apply for asylum and temporary protective status for the family, but she could not come up with the last $200. Maria’s family members only had two more months to apply for asylum, since they have to apply within one year of entering the U.S. This way, with little additional time and effort on my part, we could multiply the number of people we helped and make sure Maria’s family members don’t lose their chance to apply for asylum.

Finding an opportunity like this makes me feel very satisfied. I feel glad and relieved that Maria’s family members won’t fall through the cracks.

*Maria is not the client’s real name.


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