Immigration Law & Policy Clinic
Spring 2021 - Spring 2022: Visiting Assistant Professor Tania Valdez
The Immigration Law and Policy Clinic (ILPC) provides legal services at the intersection of criminal and immigration law and explores systemic problems in the immigration enforcement system, such as racial and economic bias, law enforcement and accountability, hyper-incarceration and access to justice. Students enrolled in the year-long clinic appear in immigration court representing indigent, detained clients in removal proceedings. Students may also provide consultations with student counsel in the Criminal Defense Clinic on the immigration consequences facing CDC clients. Students learn and apply lawyering skills such as interviewing, client counseling, fact investigation, legal research and writing, oral advocacy, negotiation, policy advocacy, and preparation for, and advocacy in, contested hearings. Through the ILPC seminar classes and fieldwork, students will have the opportunities to explore systemic problems in the immigration enforcement system—particularly where immigration and criminal enforcement are conflated and entwined—such as racial and economic bias, law enforcement accountability, hyperincarceration, and access to justice.
As part of the ILPC, our student attorneys get hands-on, live-client experience in immigration removal cases and criminal cases with potential immigration consequences. They meet face to face with clients who are looking at a variety of legal, social and economic problems, as well as learn the resources that are (or are not) available. Many students are presented with the opportunity to litigate constitutional issues and questions of the remedies available for constitutional violations.
As a leader in practical experience training, the ILPC offers classroom learning, as well as supervision sessions with faculty, the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) Contract Detention Facility run by the GEO Group in Aurora, and the immigration courts in the detention facility and in Denver.
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