Pro bono help for juveniles

CROSSING BORDERS: Camila Bernal, left, an attorney from Columbia, speaks with 2013 RWU Law School graduates Angela Lawless and Dennis Costigan about representing undocumented children and about the Pro Bono Collaborative. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
CROSSING BORDERS: Camila Bernal, left, an attorney from Columbia, speaks with 2013 RWU Law School graduates Angela Lawless and Dennis Costigan about representing undocumented children and about the Pro Bono Collaborative. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Sleeping on the roof of a train packed with refugees, then getting imprisoned in warehouses and having to beg for food when they do get free, children seeking to cross the border into the U.S. are constantly at risk, says Providence attorney Hans Bremer.
But while traveling unaccompanied as a child or teen to the United States is dangerous, living here once they’ve arrived without documentation for permanent residency also has its challenges – something Bremer would like to help remedy through his own pro bono work and the free help to be provided by attorneys he trains.
Bremer, a Roger Williams University law school graduate who specializes in immigration law at Bremer Law & Associates, spent an afternoon training four graduates of his alma mater in late February on how to help juveniles in such a position to get special immigrant juvenile status.
“Every kid has a slightly different journey, but it’s harrowing for all of them,” Bremer said.
The legal standing provides lawful permanent residency to children who are under the jurisdiction of the Family Court when it’s not in the child’s best interest to be reunified with one or both parents due chiefly to abuse, neglect or abandonment. Over several months, the two-step process requires a finding in Family Court that reunification with a parent or guardian is not a viable option; then application for the status must be made to and approved by the Immigration Court, Bremer said.
Once the status is granted, the youth can get a green card which gives them all the rights of a documented immigrant. But once he or she turns 18, they are typically no longer eligible for the special immigrant juvenile status in Rhode Island, Bremer said.
In a discrete project, staff at the Pro Bono Collaborative arranged for the training Bremer offered four colleagues and fellow alumni as part of a pilot program in order to help this vulnerable population. Eliza Vorenberg is director of pro bono and community partnerships at the Feinstein Center for Pro Bono & Experiential Education for the RWU School of Law in Bristol.
“It’s addressing a pretty desperate unmet legal need and giving graduates from our law school an opportunity to become competent in this area,” said Vorenberg. “We absolutely hope those four attorneys will at the end … be ready to take their own case.”
Adds Suzanne Harrington-Steppen, associate director of pro bono programs at the center: “We know the need is great because these cases are almost exclusively pro bono. There are very few attorneys in the state who even know how to do it, let alone would do it for free.”
In fiscal 2013, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security referred 24,668 “unaccompanied alien children” across the country to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, according to the ORR website.
Before fiscal 2012, referrals had averaged 6,775, the agency stated.
Bremer, who doesn’t have statistics for Rhode Island, believes there are hundreds of such children in this state.
“There’s a whole group of juveniles under 18 who I believe qualify for other immigration benefits who don’t even know they qualify,” he told Providence Business News. “People often come to my office at age 18, 19, 20, 25 and we do a consultation. It breaks my heart that if they’d come to me five years ago, they would now be legal residents.”
Kids In Need of Defense, or KIND, a Washington, D.C.-based outreach organization founded by Microsoft and actress Angelina Jolie, does this kind of work, matching pro bono attorneys with kids who are mostly in deportation proceedings. Between 2009 and the fall of 2012, shelter service providers across the country referred 421 unaccompanied children heading to Rhode Island to KIND, about 7 percent of the total Boston caseload, said Megan McKenna, the group’s communications and advocacy director.
“It’s a lot of kids, considering we didn’t even have an office there,” she said.
Besides Boston and Washington, D.C., KIND works out of Baltimore, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Newark, N.J., with nearly 200 law firm, corporate and law school partners.
In the fall of 2012, with the need escalating, KIND stopped taking referrals from Rhode Island, said McKenna.
“We said, ‘We’re getting so many kids in the Boston area alone, we can’t also do Rhode Island,’ ” McKenna said. “We’re in eight cities in the country and our offices are getting overloaded with no additional resources to help them. … There are many children still in need, thousands of children.”
KIND also trains attorneys to do this pro bono work – more than 6,100 attorneys since its inception in 2009, McKenna said.
“The idea is to have a network of attorneys who can take cases and also be mentors,” she said. “There are few places a child can go for representation.”
So far, Bremer has identified a few juveniles he thinks would be eligible for the pro bono services he and the other four attorneys he trains could provide.
Dennis Costigan of Pawtucket, a 2013 RWU law graduate not yet practicing as an attorney, hoped to make a difference by participating in the training.
“I can only imagine how scary it must be for kids in this situation hopefully to be able to stay in the U.S. and go on with their lives, so anything I can do to help them would be very fulfilling,” he said. •

No posts to display