Stepping Back from the Insanity
Confessions of an Immigration Lawyer About to Quit
I ran into an immigration lawyer in the elevator at my doctor’s office yesterday. I could tell that from the floor he selected, the suit he wore, and the wary friendliness in his voice when he confirmed that, yes, he did work at the immigration law firm there. Between the first and third floors, I told him I was quitting immigration law practice. As the elevator door closed, he said “You can’t quit! We need you!”
And he’s right. We do. We need me, and a thousand more mes, and that might be just about enough for, maybe, the needs in Maryland alone. But I am just one me, and I’ve started to perceive this necessary work as a form of insanity.
Why? Because the system is so broken. I know you’ve heard that before, and I’ll say more, because I mean it in a different way than you might think. But after two decades of thinking that it might be possible to meet the need with the right checklists, the right planner, the right apps, and the right templates, what I think is that expending my entire life force in a fundamentally broken system is the height of insanity. An insanity that has come close to breaking me.
What do I mean, then, by the system being broken? There’s the big picture brokenness of our laws not corresponding—not even close—to the human and economic needs of migration. There’s the structural piece of an over-funded enforcement system set against underpaid attorneys.1
But all that’s not what broke me. What broke me is composed of a thousand moments. Here are a few, in no particular order:
The young woman who was horrifically trafficked in her home country, and who was compelled at gunpoint by a Mexican drug cartel to run drugs…and whose case the government fought tooth and nail for years, into the appeal stage after we amazingly won at court, because the government apparently doesn’t win when justice is served.
The client who lost her job at a hospital because it took way more than six months to get her new work permit. And the countless letters I’ve written to employers like hers explaining that, yes, she filed on time, and yes, she is eligible, and no, there is nothing I can do to get it any faster.
The client whose asylum case even the judge agrees should be granted, who is waiting, waiting, waiting, because the government didn’t have the file—and who is separated from his endangered family members2 while he waits.
The times I’ve requested fee waivers for indigent clients, so they don’t need to pay the roughly thousand dollars to apply for their green cards—and the government accepts one for one family member, and rejects another identical one for the other family member.3
The young man with a solid asylum case whose 2014 court date was pushed back because of (1) the government attorney not having the file, (2) the Judge canceling his docket that beautiful day, probably to go sailing, (3) COVID, (4) the government saying they would agree to asylum if we got one more (costly) expert evaluation, which we promptly provided, (5) the government later saying they changed their mind, and (6) COVID. Yep, he’s still waiting. Court date set now for 2023.
The client with severe PTSD and an excellent asylum case who is seriously contemplating returning to the home where she saw her son murdered—why? Because despite having a work permit, she can’t get health care here, and she has long COVID.
The government attorney who tells the judge I manufactured evidence (dear reader: I did not. They just didn’t believe I could be that good at my job under the time constraints of that case.). The other government attorney who tells the judge I have made no effort to contact her (dear reader: I had. Oh had I.)
The public caught up in the Ukraine crisis, who don’t realize that we are facing an even more difficult crisis with the Afghans we abandoned not just in Afghanistan, but here in the U.S. after flying them here. And that the Afghan crisis layered thickly on the dockets of existing asylum claims from Central America whose cases still linger for so many reasons.
And of course the hundreds and hundreds of calls, texts, and emails seeking representation, seeking someone to ask una pregunta, seeking information to calm their fears of the unknown, seeking help for a loved one, only a fraction of a percent I was able to meaningfully help.
To any immigration lawyer reading this, this is all entirely unexceptional. It’s, like, Tuesday.4
What does that do to us over the years? The best of us—and there are so, so many—take our passion and skill and commitment and apply it to seeking results in a system that just does not work at the most basic levels. We can and do get results. We change individual lives for the better. We do. And that’s the truth in what the random immigration attorney in the elevator said to me: we need me, and others like me.
But we don’t change the system fundamentally, and we do it at a huge cost. We take our best, talented selves, and keep trying to make square pegs fit into round holes. We craft arguments. We appeal. We engage Congressional representatives and DHS ombudspeople. We seek immigration reform that (like redemption, for the Titanic survivors)5 never comes. All the while, we check in on our clients’ wellbeing, and try to connect them to medical and mental health and food resources that are stretched as thin as we are, or worse.
The fact that we sometimes achieve results keeps many of us going, for a long time.
But after close to twenty years of this, I need out. I want to, need to apply my energy and passion and skill and commitment and love of writing to imagining something better. To demanding that we look beyond the next crisis in front of us.
adrienne maree brown spoke to my heart when she wrote this in emergent strategy:
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire, as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
My own deep privilege is that I am a law professor, and I am at a school that allows people like me who had engaged primarily in clinical legal education (the pedagogy and practice of law with law students and real clients) to shift out of practice and into “regular” law teaching. The University of Baltimore has hired someone new to direct the immigration clinic I loved and developed for the last decade, and the new professor already knows every truth I wrote above, and will bring her own wisdom and passion and skill to bear on this work.
So I have been given a huge gift: the distance from practice to “engage my own imagination in order to break free.” To my colleagues still in practice, you deserve all the respect in the world. And I hope my imagination can call attention to all that is broken, and maybe even help sketch out something better.
As Mariama Kaba writes,
Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” Instead let’s ask “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.
--Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
A luta continua. (Sing it, Miriam Makeba)
Especially the underpaid attorneys in nonprofits who rely overly on exploiting female labor. A model built on the assumption that as attorneys burn out, there will be new recent law grads to bring into the fold. I’ll save that for another essay.
Lawyerly hyperbole? No. The relative taking care of his children was just murdered a week before the government showed up in court without the file.
Try explaining that to your clients.
And this list doesn’t even mention that, for those of us who work in immigration “removal defense” (fighting like hell against deportation), we are working with traumatized clients whose stories are hard to hear—and we are often the first to hear them. When a client starts to share what was most painful to them, the energy in the room shifts palpably. It becomes heavy. It is hard to breathe. Many is the time I simply have to rest my head on the desk after a client leaves, having begun their work of unburdening themselves. And many is the night where one glass of wine became two, and sometimes more, to handle it. A subject for yet another essay. (Tl:dr, wine is not the best answer.)
I have watched movie too many times not to include the reference. Sorry.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about whether the concept of Moral Harm has had an impact on your thinking of your work. I have been telling myself for the last 10 years that i can't imagine myself doing this work for the next 5. I am trying to figure out what sort of off ramps i can try and manufacture for myself- it is just so hard to think though that i can do anything else at all.