The Stairs of Separation at Ellis Island had three aisles—the left for immigrants heading to New York or New England; the right for immigrants going anywhere else in the United States; the center for immigrants being further detained.
“The Stairs of Separation” by Kai Schreiber is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Immigration

Scaling up to Meet the Need

As waves of immigrants and refugees continue to arrive from Afghanistan, Ukraine and Russia, Central America, Venezuela, and other countries rocked by war or despotism, we have followed our nonprofit partners in trying to scale up to meet the need. Some of the innovative service models we’ve implemented hold promise for increasing capacity across the pro bono sector.

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Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) worked with us to develop a cohort system for managing immigration cases for children. We brought in several similar cases at once and placed them with interested teams of associates. All the teams work on a common schedule to draft papers and prepare for filings and hearings, and they meet as a group every few weeks with their KIND mentors and firm supervisor. Not only has this eased a bottleneck in supervision, but it has also created a group of young lawyers who are learning from one another as they take on their first immigration cases.

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Human Rights First has built a nationwide system for placing Afghan refugees with pro bono counsel, and we have taken several asylum cases. Lawyers at the firm who served in the United States military are especially interested in these matters, as some of the Afghan asylum-seekers worked directly with our military and all faced violence from the Taliban after the American withdrawal. We won our first case in October 2023. We also participated in a Human Rights First clinic to complete green card applications for Afghans who had already secured asylum grants.

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The New York City Mayor’s Office has joined with various nonprofits to help immigrants who have arrived in the city by the thousands. The result has been a series of clinics aimed at assisting immigrants in filing asylum petitions and applications for work authorization. The nonprofits enlisted volunteers from firms across the region, and Lowenstein has sent volunteers to several of the clinics.

Volunteer efforts like these can never meet the need. Only a well-funded system of appointed immigration counsel can do that. But as long as immigrants have no right to appointed counsel in their removal cases, we will continue to work with the creative nonprofits that are experts in navigating the immigration system to find ways to make the most of the resources we can bring to bear.