ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
Advocating for the Legal Rights of Detained Children Alberta Born-Weiss '16 Unaccompanied Child Legal Specialist at the American Bar Association's ProBAR to include what my college major would later tell me was peace as the lack of "structural violence"—which is to say peace as the ability to realize one's full potential. During my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Argentina, where many of my friends were Venezuelan refugees and Colombian immigrants. I also spent about five months interning in Cuba, an island from which most of its citizens cannot leave. Those experiences helped me see that justice, or peace, is inextricably bound to the freedom of movement. While feeling ashamed in many ways of the path that the U.S. was on, I also came to realize the great privilege that I had in being able to decide where I wanted to live and felt a responsibility to stay in the U.S., ensuring that new immigrants could be as supported as possible. With my job at ProBAR, I get to be on the very frontlines of receiving immigrants—I either drive to or Zoom into one of the 19 "shelters" in my area that hold children recently detained by Border Patrol. I'm one of the first people with whom the children get to share their stories since arriving in the US, hoping that the
In 2020, you graduated from Wellesley with honors after doing an internship in Cuba. You then moved to Texas to become an Unaccompanied Child Legal Specialist at American Bar Association ProBAR (South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project). What was it about this opportunity that inspired you? I first got interested in immigration narratives through my Spanish classes at MA. I remember watching movies as homework or on the projector in Foster Hall that opened my awareness to the stories of young people forced to immigrate to the US due to their life circumstances. During my senior year, I took a "Why War" class, which played a significant role in my decision to major in Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley. In that class, we watched a TedTalk that expanded my definition of "peace"
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MARIN ACADEMY
I came to realize the great privilege that I had in being able to decide where I wanted to live and felt a responsibility to stay in the U.S., ensuring that new immigrants could be as supported as possible.
