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| Las Americas Mural |
Maitte spent her summer interning as a law clerk for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center is a grassroots, community-based organization working to provide high-quality legal services to low-income immigrants. Las Americas' clients are among some of the most vulnerable immigrants at the center of today's immigration reform debates.
Mid-way through my internship, I was blessed enough to have
the opportunity to partake in an International Human Rights study abroad
program. Although I had some initial hesitation since I didn’t want to
leave the cases I had been working on behind, I knew I couldn’t miss out on
that opportunity. The classes were turned out to be incredibly
interesting and very impactful as I was able to take my experience at my
internship and tie it in with other contemporary global human rights
violations. I wanted to wrap up my study abroad by going to a place that
blatantly exemplified mass human rights violations on a massive scale: the
Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland.
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| Auschwitz-Birkenau |
I remember walking around Auschwitz-Birkenau with such a
heavy heart, knowing that I would never be able to fully grasp the amount of
pain that millions of victims suffered. As you walk into Auschwitz you
can feel something in your heart drop, and I believe that the pain that
millions of Jews, and other prisoners, endured somehow lingers there, as a
reminder to those who visit to never repeat something like that again.
I’m very grateful that I was able to have such a humbling experience amidst my
summer internship because it really reinforced what I already knew in my heart:
I was called into the legal field in order to advocate for those who may be
going through the most painful times in their lives.
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| Interns with Staff |
Working at Las Americas has exposed me to men, women and
children who have unjustly suffered (through no fault of their own) at the
hands of not only criminals in their country, but their own government as
well. Every day I am privileged enough to come into an office where we
provide top legal aid to women who have been systemically raped and abused, men
who have escaped persecution in their home countries based on religion,
indigenous individuals who are stateless in the countries they considered home,
and other victims of human rights violations. Most recently, I had the
opportunity to work on a Mexican asylum case in which members of the strongest
drug cartel in Mexico massacred the entire family of a young man. This
man’s travesty across the border included seeing his parents murdered, his
brothers kidnapped and tortured, and finally having to face months of solitary
confinement for his own safety, as his persecutors were in the same detention
facility as him.
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| Church in Mesillas |
In the seventh circuit, Mexican asylum cases are rarely
granted (for political reasons) regardless of the level of violence the victims
are facing back home, and unfortunately it is a devastating blow to advocates
in the area of El Paso who are constantly fighting against lack of resources and
lack of legal relief for their clients. This was the first big asylum
case that I was completely in charge of, working independently and devising the
strategy for how the case should proceed. Almost a month-and-a-half after
sending in the parole request, I was very touched to find out that the
Deportation Officer had granted it and that our client was no longer detained
unnecessarily. That was a very significant victory because it greatly
increases his chances of being eligible for other legal relief in the future as
asylum may not be a possibility.
I am grateful to have been a part of Las Americas Immigrant
Advocacy Center, hearing clients’ stories, getting to know the clients, and
being a part of a team that so selflessly goes above and beyond to do incredible
legal work. As my summer in El Paso comes to an end, I can say that after
being at Las Americas after only a short period, it has been the most
fulfilling time of my legal career.
Additional photos:
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| In Ciudad Juarex, Mexico (Mexico's largest border city) |
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| White Sands Sunset |
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