Rising Up For Justice: What Does it Take to Defend Immigrants?

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FEATURING YLIANA JOHANSEN-MENDEZ - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, Yliana Johansen-Méndez, Chief Program Officer of Immigrant Defenders Law Center  joins us.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, Immigrant Defenders [Law Center] suggests you defend immigrants, but that's vague. Let's get deeper into the details of what it is that your organization does. You work on immigration, but how? What specifically are you doing? 

Yliana Johansen-Mendez: So, Immigrant Defenders Law Center we're commonly known as ImmDef. We're a law firm. We're a nonprofit law firm. We provide free legal services. and we're really founded on the principle that no immigrant should be alone in the immigration system. That everyone should have a qualified, competent immigration specialized attorney at their side in their deportation process. 

And so that's, that's kind of the foundation of our work, is that direct representation and removal defense. But our work is really a lot more expansive than that, now. We have to be, we've had to change to adapt to a constantly changing field and really focus on making the whole immigration system more just not just, through immigration deportation defense, but also through community education and through really strategic litigation.