This episode of SPARKS was recorded live at Cardozo's 34th INSPIRE! Awards. We spoke with the event’s two Community Impact Honorees: Jackie Pearce '13, Pro Bono Immigration Attorney at Fried Frank, and Andrea Sáenz, Senior Counsel at Co-Counsel NYC and Managing Director of the National Immigration Habeas Institute (NIHI). Jackie and Andrea have spent their careers representing detained immigrants navigating one of the most complex areas of the legal system, often without access to an attorney.
This episode of SPARKS was recorded live at Cardozo's 34th INSPIRE! Awards. We spoke with the event’s two Community Impact Honorees: Jackie Pearce '13, Pro Bono Immigration Attorney at Fried Frank, and Andrea Sáenz, Senior Counsel at Co-Counsel NYC and Managing Director of the National Immigration Habeas Institute (NIHI).
Jackie and Andrea have spent their careers representing detained immigrants navigating one of the most complex areas of the legal system, often without access to an attorney. Andrea’s work with NIHI trains other lawyers to take on these cases, which has had a widespread impact on the number of filings. Jackie manages immigration pro bono work at Fried Frank, where she says attorneys are more eager than ever to get involved to meet the needs in the community.
In this episode, they talk about what drew them to this work and what keeps them in it.
Dean Melanie Leslie
Hello, I'm Melanie Leslie, Dean of Cardozo Law School.
Associate Dean for the Office of Career Success Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
I'm Carrie Bertolet Grand. I'm the Associate Dean for the Office of Career Success.
Dean Melanie Leslie
Welcome to SPARKS, where we ignite your passion for the practice of law.
Associate Dean Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
We are very excited today because we are broadcasting live. I guess it's not broadcasting, it's recording, but we are recording live from Cardozo's Inspire Awards, where we get to honor law students and lawyers who are making a positive impact on marginalized communities and doing work in the public interest. And tonight we are honoring and interviewing Jackie Pierce and Andreas Sáenz, two rock stars in the immigration justice world. I don't know if that's an appropriate analogy, but if it is, it is for you, for sure. Jackie is a pro bono immigration attorney at Fried Frank, and Andrea is senior counsel at Co-Council NYC, which is a nonprofit organization providing support to immigration attorneys. Welcome, we're so excited to have you on the pod, as they say. All right, so first question is both of you obviously have made a commitment to immigration justice. The nice sort of coincidence and through line is that you both have done some immigration work here at Cardozo with the Immigration Justice Clinic as Clinical Teaching Fellows. So, I would love Jackie, maybe to start with you, because the question is not just what brought you to Cardozo to do immigration justice work, but what brought you back.
Jackie Pearce
Absolutely, so I'm going to take us all the way back to coming to law school. I was not quite sure what I wanted to do. I had a background in international affairs. I kind of thought I would be an international human rights lawyer. I didn't know what that meant or what it looked like, and it truly wasn't until I got to the clinic in day one of orientation with Peter and Lindsay Nash, and at the time Betsy Ginsburg and Sonia Lynn, when I sort of had the veil lifted for me on this very unjust system that I previously had many privileges to not have had to experience personally, and it really like lit a fire in me to want to do this work. I remember learning that non-citizens did not have a right to attorneys in their removal proceedings, even though these are some of the most complex proceedings out there. Hearing that non-citizens could be detained during those removal proceedings, even though immigration is not supposed to be punishment, and really I haven't looked back since then, and had the privilege to continue on through the year in the clinic as a student. Went off to Bronx Defenders to work in their NIAFIP program, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about. It's the Public Defender System First in the Nation for immigrants who are detained and facing removal, and at some point, while I was there, I got back in touch with IJC and came back to teach, which was really such a rewarding experience.
Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
So, Andrea, you did not go to Cardozo, you're our first Sparks guest who is not a graduate of the school. So, how did you get into our orbit? How are we lucky enough to have you at the agency?
Andrea Sáenz
I came to Cardozo, I think, after five years of practice, and I had been very lucky out of law school to have an equal justice works fellowship in Boston representing detained parents and moms in detention, and I think that once you do detention work, at least for me, it's been hard to stay out of that work, because it's really compelling. You can make an incredible difference getting people back to their families, and it's an incredibly diverse way to do immigration law. You kind of do a little bit of everything. So, I had been after that fellowship in government service for three years I was a clerk at the immigration court, and I was a staff attorney at the second circuit here in New York, and in those jobs I saw the work of the Cardozo clinic. I saw that they were a place that was taking hard cases and challenging issues, and so that's how I initially learned that Cardozo was one of the places where people could do cutting edge immigration work. When I was ready to go back to practice, I was really excited for the opportunity to come to a place that was trying to push what was possible in terms of getting more people represented, working on policy issues, and just taking the hard cases, so that's why I’m here.
Dean Melanie Leslie
I'll start with Andrea on this. I think our audience would be very interested in understanding more about the National Immigration Habeas Institute. Break it down like I'm in your class. What is habeas? Why is it important? What's changed that all of a sudden, we're really focused on training attorneys on how to do habeas proceedings, and why didn't they already know how to do them? What's going on?
Andrea Sáenz
Habeas corpus is the way that we challenge executive detention that is not legal, and so people do that in the criminal context by challenging their convictions, but it's also a really important tool in immigration. When people are in immigration detention, they can go to federal district court and say, my detention is illegal, I want to, I need to get out, or I need to get a bond hearing that I haven't had any chance to. So, I have been very lucky to do habeas litigation my entire career. There's always some group of people who have some kind of challenge that they can't bring to the immigration judge for a variety of reasons. They need a federal judge to look at their detention and say this is in violation of the fifth amendment, or it's in violation of being all immigration laws themselves, but it's been a little bit of a niche area for some folks, because most people who are in removal proceedings have had the opportunity to get a bond hearing, like a bail hearing, and go in front of an immigration judge and say, I'm not a danger, I'm not a flight risk, I deserve to get out of here and go back to my family. In the last year, there have been massive, unprecedented changes in law and policy that have denied a lot of people bond hearings, and, of course, we've also seen increased enforcement.
Dean Melanie Leslie
Wait, I need to just, so everybody's clear. What do you mean? Don't you have a right to a bond hearing? What do you mean? They've denied people bond hearings?
Andrea Sáenz
So, immigration is very much a creature of statute, and the changes that the agency makes can have a sweeping effect on people's rights. So, it's also a lot of administrative law, which I recommend people take, because a change in a regulation or a change in the Board of Immigration Appeals issuing a precedent or issuing a policy memo can have a night and day effect on people's rights, and so the current position of the immigration courts and DHS is that a huge number of people who would have gotten a bond hearing a year ago are no longer entitled to that five-minute hearing in front of a judge. That means people are going to sit in detention for their entire deportation case, even if they're not a danger or a flight risk. The only option that they have to do something about that is to go to federal district court and file a habeas corpus petition and say, “I deserve more review than this, whether my custody is appropriate.” A lot of immigration lawyers had not done that practice because they didn't need to, frankly. They were able to get clients out of detention, or we've had a lot of interest from people who normally haven't done detention work at all, and now their clients are getting detained for the first time, unfortunately, because of enforcement, or you have people who just want to help because they see the news and they see that there's a need for immigration work. As of last year, we were able to step up the NIHI program to try and equip people with the knowledge they need to issue spot to file to litigate these habeas corpus petitions, and the other thing that's about it is that it works. People are winning a lot of habeas corpus petitions, they've won thousands and thousands of them in the last year, and of course it would be nicer if we didn't have to file them, but while we do, there's been an incredible interest from the bar, and so NIHI fills part of that gap to try and train people to litigate and for their own clients' release.
Dean Melanie Leslie
You have any sense of how many, as a result of NIHI, how many successful habeas petitions have been filed?
Andrea Sáenz
I think someone said earlier in the program that we have trained over 200 attorneys. I know we filed at least 75 cases. We're in a cycle where we've got people from prior trainings have already filed, and we have more trainings. We have one in about a week in New Orleans, but we're going to train those folks, and then they're going to file more petitions, and so that number will only go up.
Associate Dean Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
Jackie, so you are an immigration pro bono attorney at a big firm, and some people might feel that's a little confusing, that a big firm that usually represents corporations and financial institutions, has a pro bono immigration. Pro bono counsel is not unusual, but sort of having somebody that's specific to immigration is, so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about why is your practice of Fried Frank, and sort of why was that important to them.
Jackie Pearce
Sure, yeah, so Fried Frank has a long history of doing immigration pro bono work for many years, it's something that's been a part of the priority of the firm to take on cases, including ones of asylum seekers requesting the right to stay here and decrease in persecution, taking on cases of survivors of trafficking and domestic violence, so it's something that's been like a thread through the firm for a very long time, along with a more global commitment to public service and pro bono, generally. I think what it shows about the firm that I'm at, and what makes me feel very privileged and special to be at this particular firm, is that they posted for this job last year, early on in the administration, and hired for the immigration pro bonoposition at that time, so I think it speaks that even in this moment we were one of the firms that maintained our commitment to immigration pro bono, which I don't know that that has been the case across the bar. My position is meant to manage and supervise our immigration work across both of our U.S. offices in New York and DC, and what has been for me a really exciting thing is that people are constantly raising their hands for immigration pro bono. It's not like they have to do it, it's not like they're being assigned cases. We have people raising their hands every week. I honestly can't keep up with the volume to supervise as many cases, because so many people are interested in doing it. And what has been amazing about the habeas work, and being trained by NIHI is I now have the tools to really in help supervise our habeas practice, and we've now taken on, we just took on another one this weekend. So, I think we're at like 10 or 11 at this point, and continue to push that forward and make sure that we're helping to meet the need in the community right now.
Dean Melanie Leslie
If I could follow up on that, I'm aware that most large law firms have a pro bono coordinator or someone who is bringing in pro bono cases and assigning associates to it, but you're practicing too. How common is that? Are a lot of firms creating kind of small departments that are actively doing pro bono work, led by someone who's practicing in specific areas, or is this just Fried Frank?
Jackie Pearce
I think it's becoming more common. So, I'm part of a great team, two of whom are here right now, supporting Stella Drevina and Laura Sinrod. Laura's my supervisor, Stella's our amazing pro bono coordinator, and then we have our colleague Mindy, who sits in our D.C. office. So, what I have noticed, even over the last year, is that there are more and more of these types of positions being posted for, and I think it is about the moment we are in and the need for really careful review and support and risk management in immigration cases, because of what Andrea described about immigration being creature of statute, and the agencies having a lot of power. We are seeing things change overnight, we're seeing things change by like the slight swipe of pen, and so I think maybe where immigration work was part of a broader portfolio of a generalist at a firm, it now needs to be taken care of by someone who is a specialist, who can keep up with the changes in laws, and to hopefully meet the moment.
Associate Dean Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
I'd love for you to identify, there's no shortage of things that are probably very hard in your practice, and what you do, but I'm interested in hearing what's been really tough for you, and then, so we don't get depressed, I want you to turn that answer around and give us some advice on how you navigate those tough things.
Andrea Sáenz
So, probably the obvious thing in my bio that is tough is that last year I was an appellate immigration judge for three and a half years, and last year I was terminated from that position, along with 100 plus other incredible judges over the last year, and that was certainly something that I was holding out hope would not happen to me. That was my dream job, and I had to come back into practice.
Dean Melanie Leslie
What was the justification for the termination?
Andrea Sáenz
Because they can. So, for those who don't know, the administration has fired over 100 immigration judges, essentially without explanation, and certainly I have my theories, but I think the fact that I was previously at Cardozo and had spent my career defending people was unfortunately not seen as a plus, and so you know it definitely threw off what I thought was the trajectory of my career. I had planned to spend a long time in federal service, and it was personally upsetting, and it was also professionally upsetting for what it says about the federal government right now. I've recommended to many people that they go clerk in the immigration courts or go through the honors program, and we're at a very different time. I really had to sort of take stock of my entire personal and professional life, and the way that I came out of that was actually very lovely, which was the people who helped me do that are here today, which is Peter Markowitz and Terry Lawson, who's my colleague at Co-Council, is they reached out to me very soon after I was terminated and said basically we want you back in the community and had a place for me and ways that I could contribute my knowledge as someone who's done a lot of detention work, a lot of training, a lot of appeals, and so I was very lucky to not have to go job hunting, because I had friends and community that were willing to welcome me back. I think when tough things happen, and this is one of the hardest areas I've ever practiced through, for me the answer has been community and not trying to go through hard things alone because there's a lot of power in having a team around you there that knows what it's like.
Dean Melanie Leslie
What about you, Jackie? What's been the hardest thing?
Jackie Pearce
We're losing, which is a hard feeling, and of course the losses in immigration are deportations or detentions, they're really heavy things. We just had a client who had lived in the United States for three decades, was married to a US citizen, picked up at her green card interview, and before anyone knew that she had been arrested, she was transferred to Louisiana, which has, like, a very particular meaning in the habeas work, because where your client is, is everything in habeas. So our client went from being within the second circuit, lots of good case law, lots of judges who would have released her, to she's in the fifth circuit, and we've won some cases there, but it's become increasingly harder, and one of the really hard things about these cases is you could be fighting for your client's liberty, but their removal proceedings, their deportation case, is moving at the same time, and so it can sometimes be a race against the clock to get your client out before they get a deportation order. We did not win that race. Our client had to take voluntary departure, which is like a term of art, but really means she's going to be separated from her husband for likely the next 10 years at least We had spent four months getting to know this client, meeting with her multiple times a week on video, getting to know her family, and I think for especially a lot of our junior associates, this is like the first client-based work they ever did, and I think it just really deeply affected everyone to see that the law was not right here, the facts were not right, like offended our sense of justice so badly. But one silver lining there is that she got to see her parents again, who she hadn't seen in 30 years, because of them being in her home country and her not being able to go visit them, but that's not the positive spin, because that's still obviously not the outcome we wanted. We took some time to regroup after that. Everyone had to do the things that make them feel good, find their community, read a book, exercise, go hug their kids, all the things that make us well-rounded advocates. We had to like take some time to do, and then the next week we took on another habeas, and we got our client out in 48 hours. It didn't make up for the fact that our client was deported, but it reaffirmed that the fight needs to happen, and it was worth fighting, and you can't be afraid to lose right now.
Associate Dean Associate Dean Carey Bertolet Grand
Well, we are not out of questions, but we are out of time, and I think that hopeful note is a really good place to wind up, so we thank you so much for participating in our podcast today, and we will wrap it up. Thank you so much.