Detention Center Trip

To Everyone Who Made This Possible 

THANK. YOU. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your support for our work with detained immigrant families in Karnes, Texas with the RAICES pro-bono project. Your donation helped to make it possible for a group of 11 debt-burdened law students to put their education to work,
serving parents and children in desperate need of legal assistance.

Your financial support helped our group to meet with over 100 families and to help them navigate the complex asylum system. We listened to
families’ harrowing tales of persecution in their home countries, and we helped to prepare them to tell those stories to asylum officials. We met with
families who were about to be released from detention in order to inform them of their rights and responsibilities under supervised release. We assisted on-site attorneys in keeping track of new families who had just arrived in the detention center. This work is very much needed; If we had not been there to help these families, nobody would have helped them. Without your financial support many of these families would have been left to their
own devices to navigate this process in a language they do not speak.

Thanks to your support, we were able to pay for most of our flights, rent a 15 seat van to take us to and from the detention center, and rent a comfortable house where we retreated each night, exhausted from the work and ready to rest. Without these amenities, this trip would not have been
possible.

Finally, because of the success of this volunteer trip, we are working with the University of Oregon to create an annual trip to an ICE detention center for law students.

Thank you,
National Lawyers Guild 
University of Oregon Chapter
Oregon Law

"It doesn’t feel like good work.
It feels like obligatory work. 
Because asylum is not a crime. 
It is a legal right. 
And when this is forgotten, 
I’m afraid so too
Is our humanity.
-Emily Cunningham NLG 1L