With the Citizenship Clinic at or near capacity, we need your help to address ongoing challenges.
With the latest wave of deadly immigration-related actions, particularly in my home town of Minneapolis, the pro bono Citizenship Clinic has been flooded with requests for assistance. In just the past month, we’ve seen a 300+ percent increase in client intakes, which we are working to address today (see chart below).
We should have asked for financial help months ago, but we’ve been busy. With more than 350 intercountry adoptees now being served today, our needs include physical items, such as replacing a document scanner that is on its last legs. Or to purchase basic supplies and services, such as paper, letterhead, envelopes, or a more interactive voice mail system for better communication. Or to secure a robust case management system to handle the rapidly growing caseload.
But our needs are also to sustain a critical legal service through very tough times, and to make sure we are here at least for the next two to three years.
All of what we do has costs, but those costs support our continued commitment and work to provide free legal assistance to intercountry adoptees, who may not have US citizenship or may lack proof of that US citizenship. Needless to say, it’s not a good time in the United States to be an immigrant—or even to be perceived as an immigrant—especially if you do not readily have documentation to show you are lawfully present in the United States.
We are asking the broad community of adoptees, adoptive parents, and adoption professionals to step up to sustain the clinic. We are also asking the public to help as well. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation or signing up as a sustaining monthly donor. We’re doing the work. We just need a bit of community help to keep it strong and to keep it going.
Gregory D. Luce (he/him)
Executive Director
Gregory Luce is an immigration and civil rights attorney who was born and adopted in the District of Columbia. He is the executive director of Adoptees United and the founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center, which provides pro bono legal representation to intercountry adoptees through AU’s Citizenship Clinic.
I hope you are able to start helping adoptees with naturalization again- those lacking COCs seem to perhaps be in a less precarious situation; I’m curious as to why this is your current focus?
And great mention in the New York Times today.
We are handling naturalizations—a client naturalized this past Friday, actually. But there are a couple of issues with naturalizations right now. One, they can be expensive for the client, with a $710 USCIS filing fee and the cost of travel for an attorney if the attorney is not local. That is, the representation is pro bono, the expenses are not. So there is a financial barrier for many people. More importantly, though, naturalizations have become more difficult, riskier, and unpredictable, especially with new policies that can rely on “neighborhood investigations” to investigate a client as part of the application. So we are often not recommending naturalizations and pursuing other options that are less risky but still provide stability for the near future.