Marissa Montes, founding director of the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic, was born in Mexico and brought to the United States as a child. What she \u2014 and her community \u2014 experienced growing up is what motivated her to do the work she does today. Today, she is in Mexico, meeting with Eduardo Osornio, the director of the Guadalajara office of LMU Loyola Law School\u2019s Binational Migrant Advocacy Project (BMAP), which was launched a year ago to support migrants and families navigating immigration systems on both sides of the border.<\/p>\n
Since high school, Montes has known she wanted to do immigrant rights work. As an undergrad, she worked at USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic. When it was time to choose a law school, she picked LMU Loyola Law School in Downtown LA because of its focus on public interest and social justice work. At the time, it did not have an immigration clinic. Montes decided to start one. With the support of her mentor, Professor Kathleen Kim, Montes wrote up a fellowship project.<\/p>\n
\u201cKim was the first person to educate me on the concept of community-based lawyering,\u201d said Montes. \u201cTo switch up the power dynamic\u2014instead of the attorney coming in and saying, this is what we want you to do. They listen to the community and are responsive to their needs. At the end of the day, the immigrant community better than any lawyer is going to know exactly how the laws impact them every day and often know the solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what I tell the students: We\u2019re entering a place of privilege and power,\u201d she continued. \u201cHow can we use those tools to grant access and a voice to the immigrant community? That\u2019s been my philosophy as an educator and as a litigator; listening to the community and following their lead. Maybe I know how to get there legally, the legal strategy, but they\u2019re the ones who inform me that this is the direction we need you to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Montes knows that these are hard skills for lawyers, who might lack flexibility, they are what is needed right now.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly effective and also humbling, which can also be hard for lawyers,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is something I seek to instill in my students from day one. I hope that when they graduate, they continue that trend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic is the result of Montes\u2019 fellowship project. Launched in 2012, the community-based clinic provides legal services to the immigrant communities of Los Angeles County in partnership with Dolores Mission Parish and Homeboy Industries. It also engages in advocacy and client empowerment and trains law students so they can hit the ground running once they graduate.<\/p>\n
The clinic has allowed Montes to have her dream job as a clinical professor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always thought it was the coolest job because we get to teach and work with clients,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
In the early days, the clinic focused on Boyle Heights, because there was \u201ca bit of a legal desert in the area, and it is considered our Ellis Island, the West Coast Island,\u201d she relayed. \u201cThat\u2019s where our work started, and our work has always responded to community needs, so it always changes from semester to semester depending on the issues we see.\u201d<\/p>\n
About nine years ago, the clinic began to engage in binational work. According to Montes, it was a response to the caravans that were arriving in LA.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we were noticing was the importance of information sharing before people crossed the border,\u201d said Montes. \u201cMany people were coming and seeking asylum, and we realized that many of them, unfortunately, either didn\u2019t qualify, or even if they did qualify, the outlook was grim, and we realized the importance of sharing this information before they arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
About a year ago, LMU Loyola Law School launched BMAP to address this issue. Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic has partnered with ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, to provide legal advocacy and student training to support migrants and families navigating complex immigration systems in the United States and Mexico.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been focusing, on the U.S. side, on serving deportees in terms of reintegration efforts and in terms of pathways of potentially returning to the United States,\u201d Montes explained. \u201cWhile the Mexican director and the students have been working with asylum seekers that now have been forced to remain in Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law students who participate in BMAP have to apply to the course, which is highly competitive, and if accepted, they work on cases from start to finish under the supervision of Montes and her colleagues. This is the first and only law clinic of its kind housed at a U.S. law school.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an opportunity for law students to get hands-on experience representing clients before they graduate,\u201d she said. \u201cThe idea is to train them in best practices. We\u2019re trying to build awareness and interconnectedness between advocates in both countries because immigration policy goes beyond our physical borders. They\u2019re able to work collaboratively because the U.S. attorney is limited to practicing U.S. law. The Mexican attorney is limited to Mexican law, but we can work collaboratively to make sure that we get the solutions we need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Montes\u2019 work has always been heartbreaking. Deportation can result in family separation and even death. But the amount of violence she has witnessed recently against the immigrant community is something that she has never witnessed in her 14-year law career. Yet even so, there is something about the immigrant community \u2014 the perseverance, the resilience \u2014 that gives her hope.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy binational work has shown us that there is a way that we can advocate for our clients,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t mean to lessen the consequences of deportation. But there are ways that we can accompany our clients to make sure they reintegrate, and they\u2019re able to live happily and successfully in their home country or in a third country. This binational work has been the silver lining to show me and my students that the government thinks the fight ends at deportation, but it doesn\u2019t. We\u2019re going to keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marissa Montes, founding director of the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic, was born in Mexico and brought to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49,100],"class_list":["post-485576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}