Lawyers Turn to Activism as
Civil Liberties Come Under Attack
Volunteer attorneys and legal
advisers listen to testimony from the travel ban case as they wait to assist
travelers in the international terminal at O'Hare Airport on February 7, 2017,
in Chicago, Illinois. A third of more than 500 pre-law students said the
results of the 2016 election influenced their decision to become lawyers. SCOTT
OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
August
10, 2018
To train a new generation of
lawyers to fight for the rights of immigrants after the 2016 elections, Claire
Thomas started an asylum clinic at the New York City law school where she
taught.
In Seattle, Michelle Mentzer
retired five years early as an administrative law judge so she could volunteer
as an attorney with the ACLU.
And in Texas, Anna Castro traded
her full-time job for contract work so she could prepare to attend law school
to better serve her community.
The country is seeing a wave of
legal activism as attorneys and attorneys-to-be have risen to defend civil
liberties from the policies of the Trump administration and an increasingly
conservative judiciary.
“Sometimes the law is taken for
granted, like the air we breathe, and it’s not until we are gasping for breath
that we can appreciate it,” said Kellye Testy, president of the Law School Admissions
Council. Testy had served for 13 years as law school dean at Seattle
University and the University of Washington in Seattle. “It is the lawyers who
are there defending liberty and there when nothing else is going to help.”
And a new generation of social
justice lawyers has apparently been inspired. Flat since at least the start of
the Great Recession, law school applications are up nearly 9 percent. The number of people taking
the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) through mid-July increased more than 23
percent over last year, according to the LSAC.
A third of more than 500 pre-law
students said the results of the 2016 election influenced their decision to
become lawyers, according to a survey by Kaplan Test Prep. “We need those young voices
out there,” Testy said. “We need them to see that law can be a pathway to
justice.”
It’s why Castro made the decision
last year to step away from her full-time job to pursue a career in law. She
had been working as communications director with Mi Familia
Vota, a civic engagement organization, leading up to and after the
2016 election. As Trump’s policies have unfolded, she said, she wanted to
explore other ways to effect the changes she knew would be needed in this
country.
For her, this is also personal.
Castro’s uncle, who like her parents came to the US from El Salvador, was
detained and died after being deported last year. “I believe that we need more
movement lawyers who understand the power of organizing and how clunky the law
can be as a tool without popular education, in order to change the course the
country is in now,” she said.
Today’s legal uprising harkens
back to important chapters in US history, when attorneys used the law to
advance important work for social change. Lawyers were the backbone of the
civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, defying herculean obstacles to
register voters; defending and seeking justice for those falsely accused, and
standing alongside crusaders and activists as they protested in the struggle
for social justice.
Lawyers partnered with labor to
help improve conditions for American workers, and female lawyers led the
progress on gender equality, including some who were denied admission to law
school based on gender.
The LSAC and the LSAT were started
seven decades ago, Testy said, “because law school admission was based on
gender, or race, or religion or which college you attended or who your parents
were and not individual merit. Schools came together to form a better way to
assure quality and fairness.”
President Trump’s election
triggered heightened concern over the erosion of civil liberties on multiple
fronts — from the Muslim ban and abortion access to voting and gender rights.
His administration hasquietly undone much of President Obama’s
criminal justice reform legacy, replacing it with a more draconian vision of
law enforcement.
There’s growing worry that the
president of the United States is undermining the rule of law. So,
increasingly, balance of power will have to rely on strong judiciary processes.
And that takes a lot of lawyers, on both sides of all issues and rigorous
testing in the courts.
Shortly after the election, Lawyers
for Good Government mobilized 125,000 lawyers, law students,
and activists nationwide, with the goal of defending democratic institutions
and resisting “abuses of power and corruption.” Among their many actions was a
disciplinary complaint with the Alabama State Bar Association against US
Attorney General Jeff Sessions for perjury.
And the migrant crisis on the
Mexican border sparked activism among a group of women lawyers who formed Lawyer
Moms of America. In addition to engaging lawmakers, they are
collecting airline miles and hotel points, and raising money to bring separated
families together. The group’s 17,000-member roster of men and women, moms and
non-moms continues to grow, co-founder Erin Albanese said.
Legal activism gained momentum in
January 2017 when armies of lawyers showed up at airports after Trump’s Muslim
travel ban stranded thousands of people around the world.
That spectacle inspired Eric
Sproull to return to the practice of law after a decade-long hiatus. Sproull
had been a lawyer in Chicago — representing minors in juvenile court in Cook
County and volunteering and later working part time at a neighborhood clinic in
Chicago. In 2006, he took leave to develop a career as a composer and music
producer in Ann Arbor.
But after watching the chaos at
the airport, he said, “I knew I wanted to practice law again, and I knew I
wanted to focus on immigration law.”
Trump’s animus toward immigrants
was clear from the start. He claimed that Mexico was sending rapists and
murderers, and he pledged to bar Muslims from entering the country. His
immigration policies have led to widespread deportations and family
separations. And immigration law is where lawyers have been most active.
An adjunct professor at New York
Law School, Claire Thomas is training the next generation to practice
immigration law — but in a holistic way, she said. She recalled the day after
the election when teary-eyed students, many of them immigrants, people of
color, and LGBTQ, spoke about the fear of seeing their rights and that of their
families weakened under Trump.
Right away, Thomas began hatching
a plan for a clinic to train these students to become immigration lawyers. “My
goal was that law students wouldn’t have any type of lifesaver complex, but
would appreciate that clients’ lives are complex; and that while we are going
to do everything we can for them as lawyers, we are also going to work with
social workers and others who can help get them on a path to permanency and
stability here in the United States.”
Her inaugural class was full. The
clinic lasts an entire academic year, not just one semester as other clinics
do, so students can see a case to the end — as much as that’s possible, she
said, because little is predictable under this administration.
Amid DACA uncertainty,
stricter requirements for those seeking asylum, and stepped-up deportation, the
students have no shortage of cases. Thomas teaches her students how to find
help for their clients among a network of service providers, from public
assistance to mental health counseling. And “as the dumpster fire of the world
burns brighter,” she said, she tries to make sure they understand the concept
of vicarious trauma and the importance of self-care.
Word of an immigration raid
affects everyone, clients as well as students — more than half of whom come
from immigrant backgrounds. “They are fearful for their clients but also for
themselves and their families,” she said.
As founder of Watson Immigration
Law in Seattle and a British immigrant with Bangladeshi roots, Tahmina Watson
understands that fear from both sides.
She served on the immigration
working group for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and believed Trump’s campaign
promises to get tough on immigrants were not just talk. After the election,
Watson asked the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association
to allow her to create a committee to respond to what she knew would be coming.
When the Muslim ban hit in January
2017, she helped lead the immigration lawyers’ response at the airport in
Seattle and was part of a small team that created a web-based application for
stranded immigrants trying to come home.
In July, she spearheaded the
launch of a political action committee to fund the campaigns of South Asians
seeking public office. And later, as migrant family separations on the Mexico
border spiraled, she led the creation of another organization, Washington
Immigrant Defense Network, combining the experience and skills of
nonlawyers as well as immigration lawyers and non-immigration lawyers to
provide free defense.
Watson and her fellow immigration
lawyers are at the center of the maelstrom in the president’s hardline on
immigration, as new policies and reinterpretation of old ones — most unseen by
the public — have upended people’s lives. Prosecutorial discretion and other
forms of relief available under President Obama are essentially off the table
now.
It’s not lost on Watson as a
Muslim and a naturalized US citizen that, for all the tools the law provides, Trump’s
policies can still leave her and others like her as vulnerable as their
clients.
“I would never have imagined that
immigration laws could be used as a weapon for creating chaos and fear, for
curtailing due process, and inflicting human rights abuses,” she said.
“It is crucial to recognize that
this administration has plans to dismantle democracy as we know it,” she said. “Education,
health care, climate change, public lands, social security, LGBTQ rights,
women’s rights. And watch out for their attempt to reverse Roe v. Wade,”
she said.
In the months after the 2016
elections, donations poured into legal organizations such as the ACLU as the
work they did in defending and preserving Constitutional freedoms became even
more vital.
It was why Mentzer, an
administrative law judge in Seattle, decided to retire early and, in December
2016, was “writing letters to the ACLU, asking, “Can you use me?”
Before joining the Washington
State Office of Administrative Hearings, Mentzer was a social justice lawyer,
representing farm workers in Washington’s Yakima Valley and unions in Seattle.
“The ACLU has been at the
forefront in preserving our democracy from an autocratic, right-wing, fringe
administration; suing the administration as well as protecting the rights of
those under attack, the LGBT and transgender communities and immigrants,” she
said.
Mentzer is also politically
engaged, working to help progressives flip a conservative seat in the district
that includes her hometown of Bellevue, Washington. It’s important to have
voices of courage willing to stand on the right side of democracy at every
level of government, she said.
“It’s a constant mental exercise
to feel knocked down and to pick yourself back up again, with an eye toward the
positive arc of progression,” she said. “This election was the last gasp of the
older white male. Demographics are on our side, and we have to keep reminding
ourselves of these things.”
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This piece was reprinted by Truthout
with permission or license.
Lornet
Turnbull is a Seattle-based freelance writer. She
most recently worked as a reporter for the Seattle Times, covering a range of
social issues, including demographics, immigration and gay rights.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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