Friday, March 12, 2010

Final Push

19 applications for TPS went out today as a result of many hours of hard work. We woke up this morning to the realization that we had to somehow fit all of the information that we had collected into all the tiny boxes on every form. As we checked and second checked the forms, we quickly realized sometimes we did not have enough and sometimes the information that we did have was incorrect.

So began the race to find our clients in order to fill in the blanks. Perhaps the most notable performance was that of Timothy McCauley. Armed with nothing but a name and a photograph, he tracked down in a single afternoon a man whose contact information we had misplaced. His tenacity was evident when he sojourned to little Haiti during torrential downpour in order to find our missing client.

The moment we placed the Fedex envelopes into the mailbox was one of great achievement. All the minor inconveniences and paper-cuts melted from our minds, as we realized that we had a positive impact on so many lives. We feel so satisfied and so glad that we came on this trip. The organizers, Fred, Matt, and Allison did an excellent job and were always willing to help. The attorneys, Olga, Jonelle, and Melissa, helped us to answer complex questions about immigration and taught us as much as they could in such a short time.

We learned so much! We learned about temporary protected status, filing papers with the government, and how to communicate with clients in an appropriate manner. We learned not to give up when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We also learned how smashed plantains, fried pork, and fried goat taste (great). We learned some Haitian Creole words: griot means fried pork, gratis means free, and meycy means thank you. We learned that although the world can leave ones life in shambles, the human spirit is resilient, willing to start anew. We are all so thankful to have gone on this trip.

Ed. note: Atina Rizk is a first-year law student at the University of Memphis.

How Quickly Time Passes...

It has been amazing how time has gone by so fast. Today flew by as well, the entire day felt like a race against the clock to get all of our applications completed and out the door by the time the Fedex man came at 6pm. Almost everyone that we in-took on Tuesday and Wednesday had their applications sent out today; all in all USF managed to complete and send off 10 TPS applications, with 5 more pending till next week. I think everyone feels that it is VERY hard to walk away from the files that we have started, even though they will be in the very capable hands of U of Miami students.

At the end of the week, I think we all feel a little exhausted, a tiny bit overwhelmed, but overall very fortunate to have gotten to know our clients, and be able send off their applications for them. I don't think any of us expected to do the amount of outreach that we did, and I don't think we expected our clients to have been living in the United States for as long as they had, but once the program was underway those things made sense. Of course we would need to establish ourselves in the community before gaining their trust; and although our clients were not in Haiti during the earthquake, their lives will forever be impacted by that tragedy. We are so thankful to the University of Miami for being generally awesome, and excited for the lucky students that get to come in the following weeks.

Ed. note: Dana Isaac is a second-year law student at the University of San Francisco.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Emotional Investments


While the last three days have been a lot of client interaction and outreach, today was primarily a paperwork day for most of us (Aman and Christine took yet another trip to Little Haiti to meet with their clients for follow up information). We spent a large chunk of time today in the clinic office working on typing up and actually preparing the applications that will be sent in. While a lot of the cases were fairly straight forward, several of them were complicated by criminal records. Olga and Melissa (and JoNel for a brief interlude) spent a lot of time with us looking into what exactly they did, what counts as a felony, and if there was any way around those convictions for TPS purposes. It was once again totally depressing to determine that a client was ineligible because of their criminal past; it seems like a major flaw in the TPS program.

I think that by the end of the day we were all a little surprised by how emotionally involved we are in our cases. After intake and spending that much time with our clients and learning so much about them, filling out the TPS application feels like a LOT more then just paperwork. Hopefully we can get in a lot of hours tomorrow (with yet another trip to Little Haiti!) and be able to send them off; I know that we will all feel gratified (and be able to sleep at night) to see our clients applications to the end.

Ed. note: Dana Isaac is a second-year law student at the University of San Francisco.

Light At the End of the Tunnel

It’s hard to believe that we only have one more day at the clinic to finalize our client’s files and send them off! This week has flown by!

Today was spent back in the Health and Elder Law Clinic at the University of Miami. We took the time to review and organize our cases, print out evidentiary support documents, affix certification labels to them, and meet with our supervising attorneys to get their approval on the completed files. Although it initially sounded tedious to have to ensure every crossed T and dotted I, it is really satisfying to know that we have taken extra measures to ensure there is nothing in our files that remains unaccounted for, and that our clients are getting thorough and accurate representation.

In addition to the office time, some of our team went back to Little Haiti to follow up with their clients and obtain additional documents. Though their GPS was a little faulty on the way there, they successfully navigated to and from homes, retrieving official forms, signatures, and ensuring that complete files will be sent to Immigration tomorrow.

Though we are nearing the end, we are looking forward to wrapping everything up tomorrow and sending a wave of applications off!

Ed. note - Anna Rudman-Santos is a first year law student at the University of Memphis.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Nuts & Bolts of TPS


We had a nice quiet morning to ourselves today; since we didn’t have to be at the Law School until almost 1pm, we all spent the morning relaxing in different ways. Some of our team explored the shops around South Beach, some caught up on some sleep, and some of us caught up on some ever-present homework.

Once we arrived on campus, we met with the supervising attorneys for the Health and Elder Law Clinic and had a “firm meeting,” where we discussed all the applications we received at intake yesterday, and made game plans for following up with clients, completing paperwork, and researching questions that may have come up during interviews. Even when it seemed like we had complete case files yesterday during our time with the client photos, the attorneys came up with all kinds of things for us to follow up on today – verifying Alien Registration Numbers (or “A numbers”), doing criminal background checks, trying to put together timelines for each client, and translating all of those facts into a coherent, easy-to-understand story. It took us a couple of hours to go through all the applications we got yesterday, but by the end, we all had plenty of work to get through tomorrow.

After we finished up our meeting, we headed back out to the streets to do more recruiting for the legal clinics, and to do intake at a couple of restaurants in some predominately Haitian neighborhoods. Though the intake was slow, one of the restaurants had at least 5 people come through tonight, which is great for a Wednesday night!

Tomorrow, we are looking forward to more case review and office time to get our completed applications off to Immigration by Friday!

We had a nice quiet morning to ourselves today; since we didn’t have to be at the Law School until almost 1pm, we all spent the morning relaxing in different ways. Some of our team explored the shops around South Beach, some caught up on some sleep, and some of us caught up on some ever-present homework.

Once we arrived on campus, we met with the supervising attorneys for the Health and Elder Law Clinic and had a “firm meeting,” where we discussed all the applications we received at intake yesterday, and made game plans for following up with clients, completing paperwork, and researching questions that may have come up during interviews. Even when it seemed like we had complete case files yesterday during our time with the client photos, the attorneys came up with all kinds of things for us to follow up on today – verifying Alien Registration Numbers (or “A numbers”), doing criminal background checks, trying to put together timelines for each client, and translating all of those facts into a coherent, easy-to-understand story. It took us a couple of hours to go through all the applications we got yesterday, but by the end, we all had plenty of work to get through tomorrow.

After we finished up our meeting, we headed back out to the streets to do more recruiting for the legal clinics, and to do intake at a couple of restaurants in some predominately Haitian neighborhoods. Though the intake was slow, one of the restaurants had at least 5 people come through tonight, which is great for a Wednesday night!

Tomorrow, we are looking forward to more case review and office time to get our completed applications off to Immigration by Friday!

Ed. note - Anna Rudman-Santos is a first year law student at the University of Memphis.

In the Heart of Little Haiti - Take 3...

Today was a very, very, long day. We met at the school to debrief and go over our cases from the day before, started filling out the paperwork to file with USCIS and then went back to Little Haiti for the night clinic. While it feels like we have spent all of our time in Little Haiti the past three days, the night clinic was a good reminder of how important outreach is: it really paid off and at the end of the night we had 11 new TPS clients.

What was just as exciting was that clients from the day before returned with the paperwork we needed them to bring, recognized our faces, and even brought new friends and relatives to the clinic. At the end of the day we keep coming back to the importance of making those connections in the community and putting yourself out there to establish credibility. Zahra's client from the day before returned with a relative, and Aman's client went to get more of his family members to get more info.

We have also seen a lot of parents coming in to file applications for their kids, something that Melissa and JoNel had said that they were trying to get more of. Overall, tonight's clinic felt like the result of lots and lots of outreach. Those connections really matter!

As we are getting more and more familiar with the TPS application and during our time researching today, we have all been struck by the fundamental unfairness of the intersection between criminal law and immigration law. Christine got on the phone and started doing massive amounts of research to determine what exactly counted as a misdemeanor, and was shocked to see that driving without a licence could be a misdemeanor. It seems unbelievable to not allow someone to work legally in the United States because they drove a car without a license.

Some of the clients that we had today also had a criminal past. It seems ridiculous for crimes such as theft to disqualify someone from TPS; if you are unable to work, how are you going to support yourself? Even though that seems to be a threshold matter for TPS eligibility, we are hopefully gonna do some research tomorrow to see if there is ANY way around it.

All in all a very long but fulfilling day!

Ed. note: Dana Isaac is a second-year law student at the University of San Francisco.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Haitian TPS Intake - Into The Fire...


This morning, it was time to finally don our suits and hit the clinic! We navigated through morning traffic into downtown Miami, where we set up the intake clinic in Jackson Hospital. We split into groups, to continue promoting the clinics throughout the city, to ensure that everyone who qualifies for TPS has the opportunity to come.

Willem (a University of Memphis 3L) and I ended up leaving the intake for a bit to take the train to the Haitian Consulate where we spoke with folks waiting in lines, and handed out fliers about our clinics. We were able to let just about everyone know what we were doing, and met a number of people who were excited about sharing the opportunity with their friends and family.

Once we got back to the intake, we sat down with a young man who was applying for TPS, and his uncle who was there to help translate. His application process was fairly smooth, and Willem and I learned about organizing a massive number of documents, and ensuring consistency of information on all of the forms (remember that even fairly straightforward questions can have complicated answers!). Overall, it was wonderful to finally be face to face with Haitians, and so rewarding to know that we were able to aid in helping this young man gain the status he needs to start working in the United States.

Though the clinic slowed down this afternoon, we were able to make presentations in two different schools, and hand out a number of flyers in Little Haiti, where we will be tomorrow night doing intake. By the end of the day, we had 15 different applications filled out and ready for review.

Tonight, we are meeting up with the volunteer group from the University of San Francisco Law School. We’re headed to Coconut Grove, a district that everyone has been telling us about. A little dinner and down time will be just the ticket for a successful tomorrow!

Ed. note - Anna Rudman-Santos is a first year law student at the University of Memphis.

Out and About in Little Haiti


One of the things that we have come to realize throughout our work these past two days is how important outreach is. As Aman said "anyone can fill out forms, but it takes more to make a connection and gain someone's trust."

Our morning on Tuesday was largely spent wandering around little Haiti in community centers, churches and residential areas near Nicoles in order to talk to people about what TPS is, why we are there, and why we want to do this. One of the things that we think that people forget is that we are strangers showing up in someone's community and telling them to trust us. I think by the end of Tuesday we felt good about what we had done there because it felt like we had started to make some connections in the area. We had made enough of a connection that people were sending their friends over to the clinic, people were coming back to the clinic when they said that they would, and Aman even made a connection that could allow him to make an announcement on pirate radio. One thing that we felt might make it easier would be a deeper connection and liaison within the community.

In the morning Nicole, Christine and I went to Notre Dame Church, and we felt that having someone there who was already a presence in the area would have made it easier to talk to the people there, and might have made us a more credible presence. Overall I think that outreach will continue to be important, even if the clinic is flooded with people: making a connection in Little Haiti will continue to be important for future work in the area.

That being said, intake went really well. We had 8 clients who came in, and it seems that now that they have met us and trust us a bit, there may be more people who will come to the night clinics, or the clinics in the next week. One woman mentioned that she knew of a lot of people who had received deportation notices (but had never left the country) and were therefore extremely nervous to file any kind of paperwork at all. Hopefully now that we have established some credibility more people will come in!

Ed. note: Dana Isaac is a second-year law student at the University of San Francisco.

Monday, March 8, 2010

TPS and Community Outreach: A Crash Course

Today begins our weeklong adventure into the world of TPS clinics.

Information overload!

We met this morning at 8:15 in the lobby of our hotel, and headed over to the beautiful University of Miami campus. The law school is situated in a corner of campus and the common area is known as “The Bricks”. It's lovely – lots of trees and plants, and full of students studying and socializing.

Training began at 9am with the supervising attorneys and student mentors who have gone through this process a number of times already. Training consisted of an extensive overview of what TPS (Temporary Protected Status) means, who is currently eligible for it, and how we help Haitian nationals understand what the status means for them. We also went over the forms that we will be helping the applicants fill out, and learned about all the possible ways that what seems like a straightforward question can present a whole host of complicated answers. To wrap up the morning training sessions, the trainers did a skit of an interview that gave us an idea of questions that applicants might ask, and creative solutions we can use to help them overcome apprehension.

After the training wrapped up, our team headed to Little Haiti where we ate lunch at a Haitian restaurant – fried chicken, goat, pork, and spinach plates. Even the vegetarians in our group found delicious food to nosh on!

Our team split up into separate groups this afternoon and headed out to neighborhoods around the city where we distributed flyers at local schools and organizations, letting people know about the upcoming free clinics. Overall, the response from the community was extremely positive – people were glad to learn about the opportunities for Haitian nationals and their families. One of the high schools we stopped at even let us make a presentation to a class of students!

Tomorrow we begin our intake at the local community hospital. Though there is no doubt some apprehension about what our first experience helping this client group will be like, we are all excited to take everything we learned today and put it into action!

Ed. note - Anna Rudman-Santos is a first year law student at the University of Memphis.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Visions of Palm Trees and Public Service

As we get ready to begin this week of Alternative Spring Break, I’ve been thinking back on the last month of preparation. Meetings, fundraising, publicizing, emailing, attending benefit events...all while trying to juggle classes and studying. Those of us who are 1Ls have also been scrambling to get our first appellate brief draft turned in.

But now the preparation is over! We’re all on planes today, traveling from Memphis, Tennessee to Miami, where we are anticipating not only beautiful weather (palm trees, anyone?!) but also a eclectic and enthusiastic community of law students and attorneys, all revved up and ready to go.

In the last few weeks, we have spent a great deal of time sharing information about this trip with our community. What I have heard, overwhelmingly, is how surprised people are that students would “give up” and “sacrifice” their spring break to help Haitian nationals navigate paperwork to apply for Temporary Protective Status. What seems to be the theme within our group of 15 students, however, is not one of sacrifice, but one of opportunity. We are thankful for the opportunity to make the most of our Spring Break: we are serving a community in need; we are connecting with and befriending other law students; we are gaining valuable and practical legal skills; we are raising awareness about the value of public service. And I have to say it – we are having Spring Break in Miami (again, with the palm trees!). What an incredible combination of experiences that will, no doubt, leave a lasting impact on us, both in our personal and professional lives.

Although this week will certainly be a whirlwind, full of the unexpected and surprising experiences, we are absolutely looking forward to what the next 5 days bring. We are grateful to the University of Memphis Law School and the greater Memphis community for making this trip possible, and we are grateful to the University of Miami Law School for hosting us this upcoming week.

Ed. note - Anna Rudman-Santos is a first year law student at the University of Memphis.

Week 1 Summary


Whew! The end of it all...well, the first week at least and I am certifiably...exhausted. Nevertheless, I (we) will keep pushing strong until the end of the month. The date circled on my calendar is April 1st. D-day. We will be done, done, and done.

A brief recap of the Week 1 numbers:
Intake: 16
Sent Applications: 10

The model that we're implementing is not a high volume one, but rather is designed to have each student shepherd one or two applications from "Intake to Immigration". This is unlike the models that mass produce applications and send them out the door. Our attorneys are actually taking on these applicants as clients, as opposed to helping them fill out the forms and send them in on their own. Essentially, we're professionally and emotionally invested...

Related...we learned that our clinic is at the forefront of the Haitian TPS effort. Though we are a small group with limited resources, we have been able to push fee waivers through successfully. Immigration reported that we have 30 (10%) of all the approved fee waivers. In other words, immigration has only granted 300 fee waivers NATIONWIDE, and our clinic has 10% of them. We only have sent out about 75 total applications.

Whatever we're doing, we're definitely doing it right...

So this past week went well. We were able to conduct two intake sessions and one of which was actually in Little Haiti. We've refined our approach and have decided that being in Little Haiti is better than not being there. To this end, we've secured a couple locations in Little Haiti to hold intake this week in addition to Jackson Hospital.

Friday morning I had to drive 25 miles up north to go and do a radio advertisement on Hot 105. In the flurry of emails I blasted to various groups and organizations, the dj responsed with an affirmative, "yes, I'd like to be able to help." And with that, a date was set and I trekked to Hollywood, FL. The guy was cool and it only took a few minutes. The radio ad is supposed to air Monday and Tuesday. We'll see if it yields results.

We hit the streets again this afternoon. We were talking to everyone - dodging traffic across a four lane thoroughfare and even got handed a flyer by a Haitian church group. Then we had brainflash - let's go to the Church and advertise there. When we got there, service had not yet started, so we weren't able to do much, but Melissa went back this evening to talk to the Priest. We'll see how it goes.

Everything is pretty much set for the arrival of Memphis Law and San Francisco Law. We're locked on to begin at 9 am sharp. I have to get going because my spring break hasn't yet started and I still have to read for Civ Pro II.

-fdh