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Beyond Borders
Borders
When it comes to legal fields that are constantly in a state of flux, few can match the ever-changing landscape of immigration law. Political contention has led to dozens of changes to federal policy over the past decade, heavily impacting a client base that seems only to be growing. Intense student demand for the specialization at Chicago-Kent has led to opportunities like the renewal of our Immigration Law Clinic and pro bono trips to the Texas border. But even alumni with decades of experience share with Chicago-Kent Magazine how that they are always having to reeducate themselves, and prepare for the unexpected.
Credence Credible Fear
and Consequence
Samantha Wolfe’s first trip to Dilley, Texas, was a tear-filled eye-opener. She traveled to the South Texas Family Residential Center, about 60 miles from the Mexican border, to hear more “credible fear” than she could possibly prepare for.
That legal standard—needed for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to grant asylum— wasn’t hard to meet, she soon found. Roughly “98 to 99 percent” of the fear Wolfe ’13 heard from the women and children at the center, she says, was credible enough to allow them to stay.
It was also credible enough to be traumatizing to those, like Wolfe, who were told about it. Many of the families had fled gang violence—single mothers who were extorted or raped, or had their kids targeted, either for sexual assault or gang initiation.
You have these ideas that you’re going to help people, and they tell you the worst things that happened in their life. The women didn’t care about themselves; they cared about their children,” says Wolfe, who did the work pro bono on her time off from her corporate job. “The secondary trauma…it’s really hard, grueling work, helping these women.”
Still, when she talked to students at Chicago-Kent College of Law about the experience nearly a year later, they didn’t shy away.
Instead, about a dozen of them volunteered to spend their spring break at the center, doing what Wolfe did. The following year, even more volunteered to return, meeting with more than 200 clients per trip. Wolfe accompanied them both times pro bono, the only licensed attorney of the bunch, serving as a mixture of consultant, counselor, and therapist, whatever was needed.
“These stories keep me up at night, still,” says Melissa Ortega ’19, who went on both trips in 2018 and 2019, and also served as a translator. “I know with Sam, we cried every night. It was tough. She had no duty to go and she still went. Being an attorney, I know how busy she was, and how hard it was for her to get away.”
Adds Ortega, “I am a daughter of immigrants; my parents immigrated from Mexico. For a lot of us, our parents were immigrants but they didn’t go through what the [clients] did.
“So there was this feeling, that could’ve been us. It did hit close to home....What I took away is an immense appreciation for the life I have now.”
Becca Spira ’19, who along with Joanna Martin ’19 helped organize both trips as co-chairs of Chicago-Kent’s Immigration Law Society (ILS), notes that the college stepped up its support the second time around. After Tatiana Alonso ’20, who had attended the trip in 2018, spoke to Chicago-Kent’s Board of Advisors, each board member personally pledged $1,000 to fund a return in 2019.
“They immediately emailed, saying ‘You’ve got the money,’ ” Alonso says. It was enough to cover flights, food, and hotel stays for the nearly dozen students who went. Students went again in January 2020, right before COVID-19 halted future trips.
“I don’t think a single one of us really understood what level of second-hand trauma we were going to experience,” adds Alonso, whose parents also immigrated from Mexico. “I’m glad we did it, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. It meant a lot to be able to give back.”
In November the ILS spoke and presented a documentary of its members’ experiences at a conference on student activism hosted by the Illinois Holocaust Museum. The school also created the Dilley Practicum after a push by Professor Felice Batlan, allowing the students to earn two credits for their efforts.
“We saw the extraordinary work that needed to be done, and the students were transformed by the experience,” Batlan says. “The class really explored the background of what was happening in the countries where people were coming from, and what was happening to the women in these countries. Students kept diaries and wrote position papers as a way to address the secondary trauma as well as a way to address the larger historical context.”
Wolfe’s day job is a little less harrowing—as an associate at Ogletree Deakins’ Denver office, she works with companies trying to shift their global workforce. “Global mobility,” it’s called.
Still, in recent months, the crisis management skills she honed in Dilley have helped her with that work as well. Wolfe has been tasked with trying to get clients’ families out of Afghanistan, specifically those working for U.S. companies that had operated under the old regime.
In the week after the U.S. withdrawal from the country in August 2021, Wolfe related how one of her client families has a two-month-old baby girl. Another includes four daughters. The parents—translators or point-persons for financial institutions—are fearful of their children being raised in a country run by the Taliban, which has been traditionally opposed to women receiving an education, among other numerous gender disparities.
“We’re hearing reports of people who go to the airport and see people shot right in front of them,” Wolfe said during the August evacuations. “It’s just absolute chaos. Even if we’re able to contact them…even sending that information, you could be sending someone out to their death. It’s a really high-stress situation right now.”
Both at home and from her office, which is decorated with keepsakes from trips she’s taken and people she’s met or helped, Wolfe tries at first to get people approved by the U.S. government, then to arrange for families to reach U.S. embassies in adjacent countries, since the one in Kabul, Afghanistan, closed. She communicates with them through back channels, gets them passwords for buses, and teaches them how to wipe their phones in case they run into a Taliban checkpoint, where their devices might be confiscated.
—Samantha Wolfe
And as far as entering the U.S., from the Department of Homeland Security to the State Department, “It’s a process that involves collaboration with multiple government agencies. And it’s a very complicated process,” says Marissa Cwik, another attorney at Ogletree who works on the parole cases with Wolfe.
The cases were still pending at the time of Chicago-Kent Magazine’s publication.
“She’s in the thick of this stuff, working way above and beyond what would normally be expected. All weekend, she was texting with these folks and trying to do what she could,” says John Combs, a shareholder at the firm who works closely with Wolfe and has been an immigration attorney for 25 years. “She’s honestly one of my favorite people I’ve worked with in my entire career. She has an incredible passion for service.”
But Wolfe is quick to note she isn’t doing it alone.
“The awesome thing about immigration attorneys is that we really do collaborate with each other. There’s so much camaraderie,” Wolfe says.
Every week, Wolfe scours multiple listservs, including one specifically about Afghan evacuees. Over the initial weekend following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, she received 200 emails from that listserv alone.
“We’re just going blind. There are changes at the drop of a hat,” she said at the time. “But immigration law, since the day I started, has been at the forefront of all these crazy issues.” Born and raised in Tinley Park, Illinois, Wolfe received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and taught English in Spain for a year before coming to Chicago-Kent.
Upon graduation, she initially worked at a couple of smaller Chicago immigration firms, Global Immigration Associates and R.C. Immigration, before changes to federal immigration policy under the Trump Administration motivated her to do pro bono work at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, trying to help Muslim immigrants halted there by a federal travel ban.
She expanded her volunteer efforts by taking her first trip on her own to Dilley in 2016. While there, another volunteer she befriended encouraged her to apply at Ogletree.
On top of the Afghanistan cases, adds Cwik, “Sam is really a leader in the pro-bono movement at Ogletree. She’s taken pro bono cases and made herself available as a resource.…Having a co-worker with that energy can really change for the better how people approach problems. When Sam talks to you, you really feel like she’s present in that conversation.”
When Wolfe finally talks about the typical responsibilities of her day job, though, she notes it’s nice to take a breather from cases where lives could be on the line.
“I always recommend this type of law if anybody will listen. It’s so rewarding; it’s not contentious or adversarial. You’re just fighting the government, which to me doesn’t seem contentious,” she says. “It keeps growing every single year, just the need and demand from companies. And we do get the opportunities to do the pro bono stuff in our free time. It’s a sweet spot, the pro-bono stuff can really impact you emotionally.”
“Still, people only want to hear about the pro bono stuff,” Wolfe laughs. And as far as another Dilley trip, she adds, “I’m absolutely open to doing it again.”
A Life of Service
After Seeing Both Sides
When Catherine Paler-Amaya ’03 refers to herself as “a government person,” she’s speaking from experience. A lot more experience than most.
Throughout her career she has worked for three federal organizations tied to immigration: the former United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). That’s not even counting her brief internship with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
As a result, she jokes that even her family doesn’t really know what she does, or what agency she works for—even though she’s done it for more than two decades and is married to an immigrant.
“My career is unique even for a government person….I’ve been through the immigration process personally with my husband, I have worked in the private sector in the employment immigration area, and I have worked on the adjudications and enforcement side with the government. I know and understand the challenges from all angles,” she says.
“We all come to this job for different reasons, but the immigration aspect is something that is personal. My father was an immigrant, and for Catherine it’s personal too, because she went through the process with her husband,” says Jennifer Veloz, a senior attorney with CBP who has known Paler-Amaya for 15 years.
“She brings a uniquely personal and human experience. This isn’t stamping widgets; each case is a person, each case is a family, and you want to do the right thing,” Veloz adds. “Catherine is just so ethical, and her heart’s in the right place. It’s so obvious in the way she comports herself. She’s measured, she’s patient, and she cares.”
But like many careers, Paler-Amaya’s current path wasn’t the one she originally envisioned.
After earning her master’s degree in Latin American Studies from George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C., she wanted to enter the U.S. Foreign Service. A federal hiring freeze nixed that idea. Still, she needed to find something related to her education and interests.
So she got a temporary job working for the former INS, reviewing appeals of those who had applied for status through the Special Agricultural Worker program.
“I came in idealistic, but it was a sobering experience. In the appellate unit, we saw quite a bit of fraud,” Paler-Amaya says.
Workers wanting residency had to show they’d been employed with farmers for a certain number of days. But sometimes those farmers weren’t really farmers, and some had been paid to provide false work documentation for applicants, Paler-Amaya says.
Wanting a permanent position, PalerAmaya applied for an immigration fines officer position, and she got it. It was an adjuciations position; officers in the field recommended fines against airline carriers who had allowed foreign nationals on their flights without proper travel documentation. She made sure the fines were appropriate.
But the job required some interesting training.
“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. Immigration inspectors have to learn to drive like this?’” PalerAmaya says. “We had to drive 60 milles per hour, and then the instructor would activate a remote control that would lock the brakes to put the car into a spin. I have vivid memories of getting out of those spins.”
She’s referring to the driving course she had to take during her three months at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia in order to qualify for her position. Sure, she took weeks of immigration Law courses, but when you tacked on the firearms training and self-defense courses, it all made PalerAmaya wonder how dangerous her fines officer job would actually be.
In the end, she never had to pull herself out of a high-speed spin outside of training. But the experience proved valuable.
After being promoted and working for several years at INS’s Washington, D.C., headquarters as an assistant chief inspector, she yearned to return home to the Midwest, where she grew up. Though she was born and raised in a Detroit suburb, she needed a big city. And she wanted to go to law school.
“I felt that I wanted to make a larger impact on my community and expand my abilities and career. I felt that being a lawyer would help me do that,” PalerAmaya says. “I believe it has, especially as I refocused my career in the public sector.”
She started at Michigan State University College of Law, then transferred to Chicago-Kent. As a 30-something attending school in the evening, she worked by day as a legal assistant in Sidley Austin LLP’s immigration department. After she graduated in 2003, the firm hired her on as a staff attorney in the same department where she advocated and did benefits work on behalf of foreign nationals.
But she craved variety. “I started to contemplate where I wanted my career to go. Some work was repetitive and confining to me. In corporate work you get into one area and often stay in that area because you become valuable as a specialist,” she says.
So when a job opened up working for CBP—even though it was in Florida—she took it.
She’d wanted variety, and she got it working as a senior attorney for the Office of the Associate Chief Counsel, first in Miami, then Tampa, Florida.
“I had all this lived experience with all these areas of immigration, but the CBP attorney position was intriguing to me because it also dealt with trade issues, seized artifacts, currency seizures, Fourth Amendment issues with officers and agents, and lots of employment issues,” she says.
In effect, Paler-Amaya became a jack of all trades. In the same day she could be providing immigration advice about a traveler to CBP officers at Orlando International Airport, discussing trademark violations in a shipment of auto parts at the Jacksonville, Florida, seaport, and be working on discovery in an equal employment opportunity discrimination case.
“The agency doesn't pigeonhole any of us in the field, which is what I really like. Though I like immigration a lot, I also like having a variety of other work, which I think has made me a well-rounded lawyer,” she says.
Still, she has become the go-to person in her office for immigration projects, and is particularly good at researching complex federal statutes and case law.
When asked what it is about the work she likes, aside from the variety, she says, “I like being a public servant, and I like the mission of serving my government. I feel that I’m contributing to my country. And I don’t have to write down billable hours.”
She then talks again of her husband, whom she met through a friend while working for INS in Washington, D.C. He became a U.S. citizen after they moved to Miami.
“Many of us in the immigration-related agencies, including myself, are married to people from other countries. I respect the diversity of our country. And we need to have good people in our government who understand that and who bring their unique experiences and backgrounds to the work,” she says.
“The laws are made by others, and we have to enforce them. We need smart, dedicated and creative lawyers to do this work.”
— Catherine Paler-Amaya
The
Conduit
Ben Jackson went to law school to reduce the need for lawyers. “The law really belongs to ordinary people. A lot of times by having lawyers in the process, we make it far less accessible than it could be,” Jackson ’21 says.
That’s the principle behind Jackson’s project, Immigrationhelp.org, an online app that helps immigrants fill out complex immigration paperwork for free. So far, in the beta stage, the company’s clients have successfully filled out 250 applications; the site now commands 160,000 unique site visitors per month, and numbers have been growing at an average of 43 percent per month for the past 12 months.
The massive immigration market in the United States is hardly a secret. But what’s less widely known is the fact that 63 percent of the millions of immigration applications filed every year are unrepresented, according to the American Immigration Council.
“He has a real passion for it,” says Fernando Urbina, the company’s director of outreach. “I know he has had a number of friends who had to go through this difficult process and had to pay very high fees.”
Jackson first attended Chicago-Kent College of Law in 2017, after losing his startup company to a competitor during a drawn-out legal battle.
“That kind of ignited a passion in me for figuring out the law for ordinary people, because it hadn’t worked for me,” Jackson says. “I decided to go to law school to figure out ways for people like me to protect themselves.”
While attending the financial technology (fintech) summit in his first semester, he met entrepreneur Jonathan Petts. The two talked about Petts’s project, Upsolve, an online application that allows people to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy petitions on their own, for free.
“In certain practice areas, the reason you’re in it is you don’t have money. And yet you need money for an attorney,” Jackson says.
Jackson came on board as an intern and taught himself some tech skills. He learned process automation: taking all the manual work and automating it with things like text templates, anything that would reduce the workflow. The gig lasted through 2018, and Jackson continued on at Chicago-Kent. But then Petts returned with another idea: something exciting enough to Jackson to get him to drop out of Chicago-Kent for a year and move to Boston, where the team was located.
It was a rough idea in the immigration space: something like Upsolve, but for immigration documents such as green card and citizenship applications.
Like bankruptcy applications, immigration work was seen as far too expensive; any rate was high when you had a client base with very little money.
They first imagined the app as a paid service: an in-house, mid-market law firm with a stable of about 100 attorneys that would do a lot less work, for a lot less money. The consumers, using the app, would do about 80 percent of the work.
But they increasingly saw that model as flawed.
“The process of managing an outsourced law firm was too onerous,” Jackson says. “We also realized the need in this space, who would benefit, was so much higher than we thought. And the ability to pay was so much lower than we expected. The margins weren’t there.”
So they ditched the firm idea and instead made the app entirely free.
In November 2019 they switched over to nonprofit status. And Jackson realized that, in order to increase the trust of potential donors, he—as the company’s chief technology officer and co-founder—should probably get a J.D.
“I eventually realized that the thing that makes or breaks effective service delivery was trust,” Jackson says.
So he returned to Chicago-Kent and earned a legal innovation and technology certificate from the school’s Law Lab; he was also awarded an Access to Justice Tech Fellowship and an Equal Justice Foundation Fellowship. He jokingly credits COVID-19 for making it possible: he attended remotely while still working full-time in Boston.
The company has since gained many individual donors, along with bigger ones such as Harvard University, Google.org, and Fast Forward, a nonprofit tech accelerator.
They’ve achieved high growth for months, and their online Trustpilot reviews are overwhelmingly complimentary. Due to demand, they’ve switched primarily to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) applications, and users have found them through Google search.
“One of the things we learned at Upsolve is that nonprofits have an unfair advantage in winning the search,” Jackson says. “You can get links from organizations that legally can’t or won’t link to for-profit organizations.”
“We do believe there is a role lawyers play. End-to-end and last-mile supportive hand-holding, and consumers want that,” Jackson says of their referral service. “The attorneys like it: they’re being hired for something immigrants have asked for, rather than having to figure out what they [clients] want.”
But he’s certain, when it comes to immigration, they want something affordable, which may not always include attorneys.
“I didn’t want to be the filter anymore,” Jackson says. “I wanted to be the conduit.”
Controlling
Chaos
To be an immigration attorney is to grow accustomed to change. At times, dramatic, radical change; at times slow, thousand-paper-cuts change. Every week, adding up to about 1,000 alterations to federal law over the past four years. And in a field renowned for its clogged court dockets, every change has an impact.
“I don’t know what it’s like to practice in an area that’s not constant chaos. It’s all I eat, sleep, and breath,” says Victoria Carmona, head of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Immigration Law Clinic. “But it’s a controlled chaos. Sometimes it’s just trying to do the best you can. And with students, you can’t let them get completely overwhelmed.”
But she doesn’t let them stand aside either. Every semester, Carmona brings eight students into her clinic and gives them heavy responsibilities: from interviewing and prepping clients to occasionally arguing before a judge.
Though Carmona has only been heading the clinic since 2019, she’s already made a name for herself—even with students who had little initial interest in the field.
“She really puts her heart in this. That’s what really made me get engaged in immigration law; it’s really because of her and her dedication to it,” says Hussein Nofal ’22, who plans to pursue tax law but now says he’d like to do immigration work pro-bono. Nofal excelled in Carmona’s clinic, earning the college’s Gary Laser Professionalism Award, which goes to the best student out of all 11 clinics housed under Chicago-Kent’s C-K Law Group.
“The clinic is the most important aspect of immigration education at the school. I asked Victoria one time, ‘How do you do this? How do you take all these cases and not get depressed, hearing all those—and they’re horrible cases, horrible things have happened,” says Enrique Espinoza ’21, who worked at the clinic last year, and this year received a national Peggy Browning Fund fellowship to work at the Chicago offices of the National Legal Advocacy Network.
“She said, ‘Enrique, take it one day at a time. There’s only so much that you can do, and you have to take a step back, take some free time, and keep going.’
“It’s not going to change, it is what it is. That’s the nature of these cases.”
The first case Carmona brought into the clinic was an unflinching example. Like half of the 150 or so cases her clinic now handles, it dealt with an asylum application.
A family from the Democratic Republic of the Congo had shown up at the United States’ southern border. They were a married couple with two kids; the husband had spoken out about the government.
“A lot of these cases, they don’t just go after you, they go after your whole family,” Carmona says.
The man was tortured in front of his family; the woman was raped.
“We’re dealing with so many other issues—focusing on health and something to eat—that the legal side comes last,” Carmona says.
Says Espinoza of the cases he handled, “There’s the human aspect and the legal aspect. I can’t detach one from the other.”
Dr. Nora Rowley is a board certified emergency medicine doctor with decades of experience who works with the clinic to conduct forensic evaluations of torture survivors. Even in egregious cases, she says, such trauma needs to be well documented to be believed by the government. But it can wreak havoc on testimony.
“You can have the most vivid scarring, but if you get the wrong judge or government attorney and [the client] messes up and says one thing wrong one time, the assumption is they’re purposely lying and to never ever believe them,” says Rowley, who works out of the Heartland Alliance’s Marjorie Kovler Center in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.
Of Carmona, Rowley says, “She understands immigration law and the patterns that happen. And having a specialized clinic in an academic and teaching environment is really excellent.
“People go to law school with various goals in mind, and to have this exposure I hope will broaden their perspective, make them more compassionate, even if they’re not going to practice pro-bono work.”
“What I loved about it is the fact it’s connected to the law school,” agrees Angelica Barahona, who in 2019, when Carmona was first starting her clinic, was a case manager for World Relief Chicago.
Carmona approached several nonprofit advocacy organizations who needed help with their immigrant clients. World Relief was one of them. “Wow. This is an answer to our prayers,” Barahona remembers thinking. “You’ll know that whoever is filling out [immigration documents] knows what’s expected of them. That’s not always the case; sometimes it’s an attorney who’s been through some training video.
“Chicago-Kent students don’t just do the minimum, they really make sure they understand what’s going on. That is not common.”
Back in 2019 it was Chicago-Kent students, more than anyone, who advocated for an immigration clinic, remembers then-Clinical Education Director Richard Gonzalez.
“They even did a petition a couple years back. They were upset. I think it was mostly because immigration is just so darned important lately,” Gonzalez says.
Chicago-Kent’s in-house firm, C-K Law Group had attempted to get such a clinic going twice before, but they’d only lasted a couple years. Gonzalez wanted one that would last.
Carmona had just been offered a partnership at one of Chicago’s largest immigration firms, Robert D. Ahlgren and Associates, where she had worked for five years.
But the chance to run her own clinic appealed greatly to her.
“I started out the first weeks saying, ‘Oh, God, hope this works!’ I had a few clients that ultimately followed,” she says.
And now…
“How do I get clients?” Carmona offers a rueful chuckle. “So many nonprofits that do pro-bono cases are just overwhelmed. We’ve been so busy because there’s such a demand for immigration lawyers.”
Carmona voices a common lament you’ll hear from most immigration attorneys: there’s not enough of them. Especially for asylum cases, whose clients typically don’t have a ton of money.
Since 2015 the number of cases pending in immigration court has skyrocketed from 400,000 to 1.2 million.
Part of the problem, Carmona says, is all that chaos. Over the past four years, there was so much of it, it had to be willful, she believes. And government prosecutors were not allowed to exercise discretion: rather than focus on egregious violations, all cases had to be tackled equally.
“We have a single mother with no criminal history, who has a U.S. citizen child with cerebral palsy. What is the purpose of focusing on her? This child’s going to end up in state custody, which—aside from the obvious humanitarian harm and lasting trauma a separation from a child and mother would cause— would end up financially costing the government even more,” Carmona says.
“It’s become so much more political than it needs to be,” Carmona says. “[The Trump administration] would just try to cut corners everywhere, making changes without notice or comment. And you have to understand, we’re dealing with numerous agencies: the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration court systems….So if there’s a change it’s not just one change, it’s a change that ping-pongs and affects others.”
But helping students navigate all that “controlled chaos” is something she says she’ll always strive to do.
“The best way to learn law is to have someone there for you, to lead you through it. The law is a living, breathing thing. and it takes experience to understand. That’s what I’ll always be here for,” Carmona says. “I want to make sure the next generation is here to continue this work.”
