Defending children from deportation
Alexandra Rizio has long fought for refugees in her professional life, starting as a volunteer with the Refugee and Immigrant Fund in Queens, New York. Today, she is a senior staff attorney at Safe Passage Project, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Unaccompanied Latin American Minor Project (ULAMP), a collaboration with City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice that provides pro bono legal assistance to children in deportation proceedings.
In 2014, when parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala saw a brutal uptick in violence and poverty, many children fled, some without an adult to shepherd them to safety. After making it across the U.S. border, says Rizio, children often are detained immediately, then sent to foster homes or relatives elsewhere. And their journeys are just beginning.
“We’ll show up on their first day of court with volunteer attorneys and translators,” Rizio says. “If it weren’t for organizations like Safe Passage and others, they would literally be on their own facing the judge.” Since ULAMP teamed up with Safe Passage in 2014, attorneys have represented 830 children in New York state and spared 208 children from deportation.
[For more of this story, written by Jaime Alfaro, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/iss...-immigrants-20170227]
Comments (0)