Around a circular table, Duke law students discuss writing a declaration. Their composition is more than legal jargon describing a case.
Their words – the facts they are presenting for their clients – could be life-changing. For someone looking to remain in America, struggling in legal limbo, it could mean freedom. Safety. The preservation of a family.
The students feel the urgency and take the work seriously, guided by Duke law professors Kate Evans and Shane Ellison. Their approach is to mingle the legal with the human as they drill in on how to make sure their clients’ experiences come through.
“When we’re doing this right, our students can transform people’s lives beyond imagination,” Evans said.
This meeting isn’t simply a case study or class exercise. Clients of Duke’s Immigration Rights Clinic are real people in need of legal help. And the clinic students are learning how to identify the legal requirements that apply to their clients and guide them through that process.
Evans, the clinic’s director, brings passion for justice to her work. She grew up in central Pennsylvania and attended a Quaker high school for two years, notable, she says, for its devotion to principles of equality and service. She graduated from Brown University and began her career as a management consultant followed by policy advocacy for Doctors Without Borders. There, she completed field work in Uganda on HIV/AIDS treatment and research. Later, she spent about a year in Guatemala.
Back in the U.S., Evans attended law school at New York University on a scholarship that supported her public interest work. She and her husband started their family while she was still a student, and after graduation they moved to Minnesota to be near friends and family. There she clerked on the state Court of Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.
Evans went on to become a teaching fellow at the University of Minnesota for a time and co-founded her own small private immigration law firm.
“I didn’t leave law school thinking I would be a clinical education teacher,” she said. “My experience as a clinic student was transformative, but I was focused on direct service. I think through the teaching fellowship, I came to appreciate what a privilege it is to work in a clinic with students where we were able to identify the cases that had the best combination of service and learning.”
She moved to the University of Idaho to lead an immigration rights clinic for three years, working with first-generation college students, many of whom were from immigrant families and were pursuing legal careers directly impacting immigrant communities.
She joined Duke in 2019 to launch the immigration clinic, which opened its doors in January 2020. Today the clinic enrolls eight to 12 students who dedicate between 100 and 150 hours to represent their clients each semester, depending on the credit hours they wish to take. Those clients do not have other legal representation, Evans said.
Evans works alongside Ellison, another law professor and supervising attorney with a strong background in immigrant rights. He came to Duke from Nebraska, where he was the legal director at a nonprofit and founded a similar clinic at Creighton University’s law school.
A native of Pueblo, Colorado, Ellison calls his job at Duke an honor and says he seeks two outcomes that are crucial for students who participate in the clinic. “At the highest level what I hope they take away is the importance of empathy in being a lawyer – the ability to really understand the situation in which our clients find themselves,” Ellison said. “My top priority is I hope the students have a deep sense of justice and a fire in their belly to make a difference.”
Immigration clinics fill in the gap for clients who typically do not have resources to pay for legal counsel, he said, noting that the clinic helps asylum-seekers fleeing persecution, noncitizens facing deportation, as well as people in need of protection and security.
“There is a statutory right to counsel in removal proceedings, but at no expense of the government. People who can’t afford counsel have to go it alone,” Ellison explains.
For second-year law student Juan Colin, joining the clinic was a way to honor his family’s culture. His father is from Mexico and his mother is from Honduras. “It was important for me to do as the son of immigrants,” Colin said. “I found it to be a great way to be able to help people from my community and be able to help people from around the world that were trying to access citizenship and are trying to access their rights as immigrants in this country,” he said.
While many students in the clinic will likely not practice immigration law after graduation, Ellison calls them a “force multiplier” for the system as they move on to their legal careers. His hope is that some will use what they learned and devote their pro bono hours to continuing immigration work.
For many students who participate in the clinic, there is also that validation of seeing the power of their legal efforts, and what they have learned at Duke, come full circle to truly help someone in need.
It’s rewarding “when they have put in many hours to walk with a client through an extraordinary legal proceeding, to see how their time, energy and effort can radically impact the trajectory of someone’s life,” Ellison says. Evans added, “My greatest joy is watching clients put their trust in our students and seeing students emerge at the end of the semester with a newfound confidence in their ability to effect change. There is simply no better job in the world.”