Today, I hosted the biweekly meeting of the West Virginia Immigration Lawyers Roundtable. Our small (but powerful) immigration law bar in West Virginia meets for an hour on Zoom every other Friday to compare notes about immigration practice in our region. All discussions of cases are anonymized so that attorneys can share practice tips without any identifying facts about a client.

The roundtable also gives local practitioners an opportunity to develop relationships and collaborations. Today, we welcomed a new lawyer, Nathan Tauger, Morgantown native and Stanford Law grad, who will be Equal Justice Works Fellow at Mountain State Justice this year, representing clients in immigration, workers’ rights, and civil rights cases.

We also discussed an exciting opportunity for local nonprofits to host fellows to represent unaccompanied migrant children in West Virginia. This program, a partnership between Immigrant Justice Corps, Vera Institute of Justice, and Acacia Center for Justice, would help to ensure that kids living in our state don’t have to go before an immigration court alone.

This program could be a big step forward toward providing comprehensive access to justice in West Virginia, which more than 27,000 foreign-born residents. Most foreign nationals in West Virginia are naturalized citizens or permanent residents, but nearly 5,000 people - including about 2,000 U.S. citizens - live with at least one undocumented family member (based on 2010-2014 data).

Now it’s time to work through the details (and the devil’s always in the details). But every step toward Universal Representation in immigration court - just like in our criminal courts - is a step I’m excited to take.