In Immigration Law Clinic, students go beyond studing the law from books and get to begin practicing their skills with real clients. To help them go from theory to practice, the course meets three hours a week to discuss and practice the concrete skills that students will use in pursuing their cases.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It: Immigration Court Motions

For example, each time in the ILC this year has a case involving removal proceedings before the immigration court. If the government is successful in proving their case, the individual will be removed from the country. Each of our clients has an affirmative defense (such as asylum), and if they prove their eligibility, they are lawfully entitled to stay.

Like most court proceedings, immigration cases often involve filing motions. Unfortunately, immigration court rules are more technical than any federal or state court or arbitral tribunal I’ve practiced before, so students need to learn how to prepare, format, and file an immigration court motion. If you file a motion with a single technical defect, the court can reject it. Hopefully - hopefully - you’ve left yourself enough time to correct and re-file.

These are things that every attorney needs to be able to do in practice - but that you don’t learn from sitting in class reading textbooks.

Mission Possible

To break this down for students, last week each student had the assignment to review the Immigration Court Practice Manual and make a list of requirements for submitting a motion. In class, I presented some “Best Practices” and some “Frequently Asked Questions” about immigration court motions, including some of the most deadly traps for the unwary. I then distributed a one-page checklist containing some of the easiest-to-overlook formatting errors (mostly errors we’ve learned about the hard way at some time or another). Students were encouraged to post a copy by their computer, and we’ll place copies in a central location in the clinic office for last-minute verifications before anything goes out.

This week, the students will have an in-class exercise where they will draft and format a short immigration court motion. The substance of the motion itself is simple, just a page or two. But there are specific rules about what has to be listed, what type of evidence has to be provided in support, and of course how the motion and evidence have to be formatted and filed.

Students will receive an office memorandum outlining their assignment, several documents from “the file” in the hypothetical case, and a template from a previous case that they can use as a starting point (as is customary in most law practices). They will have two hours to prepare their motions, trying to be as accurate as possible.

Preparing for law Practice

The stakes of this assignment are low - each student will receive individualized feedback and their work will be considered as part of their overall work product for the year, but there’s no numerical or letter grade assigned. Most importantly, the “client” in this case isn’t real - no one is at risk of removal, and you’re not charging attorney’s fees to anyone while you learn.

Most likely, every student in the ILC will take a bar exam next summer, and most likely (I’m confident) all of them will be licensed attorneys next fall. Some will probably practice immigration law, others may practice in other types of courts where they will also have to draft, format, and file motions on deadline.

We also do exercises and workshops on how to effectively interview a client, how to prepare a “map” for your case, and how to do oral advocacy before a court. With the experience they gain in the law clinic, students will start law practice not only having tried their skills with a couple of real clients, but also with a “how-to” book of best practices they can draw from in any practice setting.