By: Professor Abby Colbert
After many years of teaching U.S. Immigration Law and Policy, I knew I wanted to teach a Community Engaged Learning course that offered students the opportunity to gain perspective on the immigration system by participating in the representation of immigrant clients. I often share (anonymous) anecdotes from my legal casework with students and I knew that nothing could better provide students the perspective on policy, on various stakeholders’ roles, and on immigrants’ experience with the system than working directly with immigrants in that system.
During the Advent 2024 semester, the nine students enrolled in POLS 391 (Immigration Legal Clinic) were assigned in groups of two and three to assist me with the representation of four clients—from Afghanistan, Kenya, and Venezuela—who had been granted asylum and were seeking their legal permanent residence (green cards) on the basis of their asylum grants. After an introduction to professional responsibility and case mechanics, each Tuesday we reviewed our cases and progress together and students learned legal advocacy skills; each Thursday we examined the asylum law and policy context of our client work.
The biggest hurdle in planning the course was identifying a local non-profit community partner. Having been the Managing Attorney of an immigration non-profit, I know that establishing a relationship and referring cases requires an organizations’ staff time and effort as well a leap of faith that the partnership will offer the organization a return worthy of that investment of resources. Ultimately, I was fortunate to find a community partner in the PAIR (Political Asylum/Immigration Representation) Project, an organization in Boston with whom I have a long history of collaboration.
Working with clients remotely had unexpected benefits. My students met with their assigned clients over Zoom, which allowed us to meet outside of an organization’s business hours, which our clients appreciated. It also gave students an unexpected glimpse into clients’ daily lives—and often literally into their homes—providing an unusually intimate perspective.
But, working with clients remotely also had the drawback of requiring the mailing of sensitive documents back-and-forth for required signatures. We were fortunate that the CfT approved my peculiar grant request to fund the priority postage costs that allowed documents to be exchanged and cases to be filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Although we won’t know the outcome of our cases for many months, I believe that students’ hands-on experience in the course provided them invaluable preparation to think critically about the immigration system’s structures and procedures and about immigration advocates’ relationship to the system. As one student remarked, “[Working with clients] teaches us in a way that books and lectures can’t communicate.”
Abby participated in our Community Engaged Learning (CEL) learning community in May 2024 and received a CfT Mini-Grant to support this project in Fall 2024.