Here’s How Law Schools Are Training The Next Generation Of Immigration Activists

Some of the top law schools in the country are purposely training students to defend illegal immigrants as part of their coursework.

Clinics and workshops hosted by Columbia, the University of Chicago and numerous other top schools use law students to represent illegals in court, fill out paperwork that the migrants cannot read, and hinder Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions. Many law schools require students to participate in clinics, and the American Bar Association (ABA) — the only recognized law school accreditor in the U.S. — requires students to complete experiential learning hours, such as a law clinic.

The ABA also encourages student to complete pro bono work, which perfectly aligns with the legal representation these clinics demand from students.

At the University of Chicago Law School, which is ranked fourth in the country by Law School Data, hosts an “Immigrants’ Rights Clinic” that “provides legal representation to immigrant communities in Chicago and around the country, including individual representation of immigrants in removal proceedings,” according to its website. Students are asked to “develop claims and defenses” for immigrant clients and “draft and advocate for legislation at the state and local levels and provide support to immigrants’ rights organizations,” among other tasks.

The clinic’s “significant achievements” include advocating for a “Tunisian national who was arrested on September 13, 2001, for plotting an attack against a US military base,” preventing illegals from being turned over to ICE, and fighting for the release of a man accused of having “connections to ISIS,” the law school’s website indicates.

Columbia University maintains a law clinic of the same name, which has students “take on direct client representation” and “offer pro bono legal services to asylum seekers,” according to its website.

“Many asylum seekers try to navigate the complex immigration system alone, in a language they do not understand,” the clinic’s website states. “Working under the guidance of the clinic’s faculty, student attorneys represent asylum seekers from around the world who are facing deportation. Student attorneys who continue in the clinic beyond a single semester may have the opportunity to work on more complex casework and take on varied forms of advocacy.”

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law takes it a step further with an entire center dedicated to immigration, aiming to be “a national leader in immigration law and policy,” according to its website. Along with a clinic teaching students about “immigrants rights,” UCLA tells students to view U.S. immigration policy through a racial lens.

“For more than two centuries, U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion, removal, and punishment,” its website reads. “Although U.S. immigration law and policy have shifted over time, the nation’s immigration enforcement regime has consistently produced this result.” (RELATED: Lawyers Have News For ICE Haters Who Think ‘Legal Observers’ Are Special)

Countless other law schools host similar programs, some catered towards specific races, and often times working with pro-immigration, anti-ICE activist groups. In fact, nearly every single one of the top ten ranked law schools in the U.S. had some form of immigration clinic that openly defends illegal immigrants, often putting students in charge of representing them in deportation cases, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s review based on Law School Data’s rankings.

The University of Virginia has the Immigration Law Clinic. New York University has its Immigrant Rights Clinic. Yale’s clinic is more honestly titled “Legal Assistance: Immigrant Rights Clinic.”

Along with an “Immigration and Refugee Clinic” that once again seeks “to advance immigrants’ rights” and has students directly represent illegals, Harvard created an additional immigration-related project called the “Crimmigration Clinic,” which studies “the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.”

Law schools’ activism even goes beyond direct representation.

The University of North Dakota recently hosted an event training students to become “legal observers” who follow, record, and often antagonize ICE officers during deportation efforts.

Stanford Law School has an entire blog series about how the Trump administration’s immigration policies are racist, along with its legal representation for illegals clinic.

The University of California, Berkeley law school’s “Human Rights” clinic boasted about once having law students provide workshops and materials about immigration law to more than 300 non-U.S. citizen students, as well as helping to place these illegals with “pro bono attorneys for representation.”

“Through the program, many students successfully applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) – an administrative program which allows certain undocumented young people to apply for a two-year, renewable stay on deportation and affords eligible applicants a work permit. Others have been able to secure status through a family member, a U Visa, or other legal avenue. The Legal Services Program has assisted hundreds of Cal students and created a model for the provision of immigration legal services to undocumented students on college campuses,” the website reads.

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