ASAP Featured in Legal Journal

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) is proud to be featured in Professor Lindsay Harris’s recent article in Clinical Law Review entitled “Learning in “Baby Jail”: Lessons from Law Student Engagement in Family Detention Centers.”

Harris’s article examines law student learning in family detention centers between 2014 and 2017. Drawing upon strategies used by groups including ASAP, Harris offers principles for law student engagement in immigration detention centers in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.

Citing volunteer work done by ASAP’s co-founders while students at Yale Law School, Harris writes: “Some student engagement in family detention centers defies categorization and represents hybrid models and organic responses to the crisis. Yale Law School students, in particular, have been pioneering in the family detention sphere.” She goes on to detail the work ASAP’s co-founders did to remotely represent families forced to go to trial while detained at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.

Harris writes that this remote work at Dilley laid the foundation for ASAP, and that “in Fall 2016, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project became a project of the Urban Justice Center, founded by four Yale law students, now graduates, who were veterans of family detention work.”

ASAP is proud to serve as an example for law students working in immigration detention centers across the country. We are thankful to Harris for her article and its practical proposals for law student engagement in response to the crisis of immigration detention.

Lindsay Harris is an Assistant Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.