By Brooklyn Dottin
Amid President Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, many immigrants are seeking legal counsel about their rights and the lawful paths that they might pursue to remain in United States, despite a looming threat of deportation. There are relatively few options for them, but one is Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law.
Students from the law school’s Deportation Defense Clinic provide client representation, community engagement and impact litigation to Long Island’s undocumented immigrant community, according to its website. The clinic, headed by Professor Alexander Holtzman, is about ensuring that immigrants without legal status have their cases heard in court.
Serene Hozien, a third-year law student, works in the clinic. “Our clinic is an advocacy clinic,” Hozien said. “We’re working to help clients. We’re working with clients, and we’re working to help navigate these cases and just help people navigate the new immigration laws.”
Ashley Hall, another third-year law student, addressed concern over law students taking on deportation cases. “Our clients are very patient with us,” she said. “There might be a presumption that we are juvenile and that we do not necessarily know how to handle things, and we are novices in what we do. But a large majority of our clients are very understanding that we are currently learning, and they give us a lot of grace.”
To address what Trump has called an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants, the president has called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to step up enforcement. The DOH website states ICE arrests had increased 627% from Jan. 20, when the president was inaugurated, to Feb. 26.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican from Atlantic Beach and Trump supporter, stated in February that the county would make its jails available to ICE to round up undocumented immigrants and assign 10 police detectives to work with ICE to arrest known criminals who are without legal status and deport them.
In mid-February, immigrants rights groups gathered in front of Nassau County’s Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building to protest the county police department’s partnership with ICE. Immigrants “are the bedrock of every community in this state and in this country, and under no circumstances should the state law enforcement or city law enforcement or municipal law enforcement be colluding with ICE,” said Robert Agyemang, of Hempstead, vice president of the New York Immigration Coalition.
In response, Blakeman said county detectives would only be used to arrest known criminals, not to conduct mass raids of undocumented immigrants’ homes and workplaces.
Hozien outlined the challenges that the Deportation Defense Clinic has faced since Blakeman signed the agreement with ICE. “We don’t want any of our clients to be deported,” she noted. The clinic, however, must navigate between federal, state and local law.
Under New York State/New York City law, authorities must obtain a judicial warrant to arrest undocumented immigrants. ICE, however, is “delegating powers to Nassau County police detectives to basically arrest undocumented non-citizens without a warrant,” Hozien said.
Hozien pointed out the danger of these arrests. “That is very dangerous, especially in an over-policed county, and especially when the main way you can do this is by racially profiling, and that puts so many people at risk, even those who are documented,” she said.
Another of Hofstra’s immigration programs is the Asylum Clinic. The initiative, formed and spearheaded by attorney Lauris Wren, is composed of law students who represent asylum applicants before officers, immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals, according to its website.
“The students work closely with the clients,” Wren said, “to make sure that they understand exactly what has happened to their clients, so that they can help them prepare a statement and gather proof of the harm that they have suffered.”
Much like the Deportation Defense Clinic, the students are fully involved in client services. “They assist the clients,” Wren said, “in understanding what the process is, so that the client can fully be involved and fully participate in that process, so that the adjudicator in the case, either the judge or the asylum officer, understands what has happened to the client, why that has happened, and what the client will fear will happen when, if they have to return to their home country.”
Wren addressed a concern that the clinic might be forced to close because of Trump administration policies. “I do not have any fears that my clinic is going to be shut down,” she said. “You know, my fears right now are actually the opposite of that.”
She noted, “We are being overwhelmed with people seeking assistance and also with people wanting to assist the clinic in our work. We are quite a small clinic, the asylum clinic. I am the only actual attorney, although I have wonderful law students working with me.”
Hall said she was not worried about the Deportation Defense Clinic, either. “I am not really afraid that our clinic will necessarily be targeted and shut down, as immigrants do have a right to counsel,” she said. “Immigrants in removal proceedings have a right to counsel, and so I think as long as we keep up the work that we are doing, I think that we will be able to kind of stand strong in the face of Trump’s new policies and the new administration.”
Despite the current wave of executive orders by the Trump administration, the work at Hofstra’s Deportation Defense and Asylum clinics carries on. “We will always advocate for our clients,” Hozien said. “We will always try to appeal their cases whenever we can. We want to help them work to obviously end their trial case and go past the deportation proceedings and help them seek different forms of relief in the United States.”
For more information on the Deportation Defense clinic, click here.
For more on the Asylum Clinic, click here.
