VLP attorneys Brenda Cisneros Vilchis ’13 (LLM), Hollis DeAbreu Davis, Aaron Aisen ’11 and Brittany Triggs.
New Immigration Clinic Trains Advocates, Defends Rights
For immigrants facing federal detention, the Erie County Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyers Project (VLP) has long been a lifeline. Now, a new Immigration Clinic at the law school will expand that support—placing six students alongside VLP attorneys in Buffalo and Batavia, where they’ll confront the challenges of detention and appeals while preparing to become the next generation of justice-driven advocates.
VLP immigration attorneys represent individuals detained at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility located in Batavia. They also represent clients appealing decisions in removal proceedings in federal courts in Buffalo and Rochester. VLP’s non-detained program assists individuals with affirmative applications and before the Buffalo Immigration Court. Students in the new clinic will spend six weeks in Batavia interning with their detained program and six weeks in Buffalo with their non-detained program.
“Our clinical program has a long history of partnering with the Volunteer Lawyers Project,” says Vice Dean Bernadette Gargano, director of clinical legal education at the law school. “This new collaboration recognizes the critical need to train future lawyers in both affirmative and defensive immigration law, especially at this point in history.
"VLP will provide considerable expertise through four experienced immigration lawyers, who will train our students in the procedural and substantive aspects of immigration work in both administrative hearings and federal courts as well as the cultural nuances and the social justice issues embedded in this type of practice.”
In Batavia, students will work with clients detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—meeting with detainees, gathering evidence and writing memos of law. According to Brenda Cisneros Vilchis ’13 (LLM), director of VLP’s Detained Immigration Program, the staff attorneys will welcome the help. “There’s a push for some of these cases to be decided by the immigration courts much quicker than previously,” Cisneros says. “We need to have our cases prepared and ready to go to trial faster than before.
“There is a lot of immigration work to do in this area, but the immigration bar is really small,” she says. “We would like to get more students interested, or at least make them aware that this is an area of law that they can practice in.”
There’s also a classroom component to the clinic, to be taught by the four VLP lawyers: Cisneros, Aaron Aisen ’11, Hollis DeAbreau Davis and Brittany Triggs.
As a senior staff attorney, Aisen leads the project’s appeals and federal court practice. He says students will help with work in that area, including drafting habeas petitions and appellate papers for detained individuals. “My goal is to have them develop experience in learning how to draft these documents and perhaps even get them into court to see how a case is argued,” he says.
“It’s a fascinating area of the law, and something that people are interested in especially now,” he says. “These students will see the nuts and bolts, how things work, on a much more nuanced level than they might experience otherwise.”