Three weeks before the fall semester, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg prepared a lecture for George Mason University law students on the structure of the U.S. immigration system. He’s the director of the Immigrant Advocacy Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center, a nonprofit that offers legal services to low-income Virginians.
By the time he taught his first class, the system’s structure was on the cusp of change. The Department of Justice had proposed a new set of regulations.
“Things that have been true for the 11 years I’ve been in practice aren’t true anymore,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “You can’t recycle last year’s lesson plan. That’s for sure.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg is a co-teacher at the new Immigration Litigation Clinic at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Legal Aid Justice Center. Over the course of a year-long program, the clinic will give six George Mason law students an in-depth, hands-on experience where they’ll represent clients facing deportation. The program opened this fall.
Becky Wolozin, co-teacher and director of the Immigration Litigation Clinic, emphasized that the new initiative will be a benefit to both law students and local immigrants in need of legal help.
“There’s a real shortage of representation in immigration,” she said. “Having clinics where students can provide services and also potentially learn and hone their craft and go on to work on behalf of immigrants after law school is a really important thing.”
As a law student at Harvard University, Wolozin participated in clinics and “loved it,” she said. Clinic work enabled her “to have a connection to real people, to clients, and to feel like I was able, even in my small way, to materially make their lives better and get them through whatever legal issues they were facing.”
