Feature Articles
3L: It's a Wrap
Rebekah Salazar
One fall afternoon at Georgetown Law, dozens of students file into Room 206 of McDonough Hall where Visiting Professor Muneer Ahmad is about to teach a course called Immigration Law and Policy. First on the agenda is the 1963 court case Rosenberg v. Fleuti — in which a Swiss national, living in the southwestern United States, crossed the Mexican border to spend a couple of hours in Ensenada and faced deportation proceedings as a result. The moment before the discussion begins, the door opens, and student Rebekah Salazar (L’09) hurries in — not late, but exactly on time.
She takes a seat in the front row, as the class begins to examine whether respondent Fleuti’s return to the United States from his day trip to Mexico constituted an “entry” for purposes of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — and whether his trip was intended as a “departure,” disrupting his resident alien status. One student speculates that the U.S.-Mexican border may have been less seriously enforced in 1963 than it is today, meaning that the crossing was not intended to be anything more than a brief day trip. Salazar — who in her day job serves as an assistant chief for southwest border operations for the U.S. Border Patrol — listens. In her role as a Georgetown Law 3L student, she is still learning like everyone else.
“I dealt with admissibility issues in the field, but immigration law is very complex and there is always something new to learn,” says Salazar, who works in the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “At headquarters our role is more administrative.”
What she does do, for 10 hours of a very long day, is assist the border patrol with anything the agency might need in overseeing the Mexican border: resources, funding and the like. “At the headquarters level we work on policy and national programs to assist the field with their mission,” she says.
So in Professor Ahmad’s immigration law class, she listens attentively to the lecture on the evolving law of returning lawful permanent residents and notes changes in the law since Fleuti. While she may not need to discuss that particular case in her day-to-day work, her hard-earned legal skills definitely come in handy. In a course she took last summer, for example, she learned the finer points of negotiation, which she found could be easily applied to her work life. “We learned in negotiations the first day that you have to give up something or you’re not going to end up with anything … which was a big lesson for me,” Salazar says. “I think it’s useful at work in terms of taking the time to listen to somebody and trying to share ideas and present my idea in a way that it gets equal consideration. I’m negotiating my point.”
Still Intense
If taking immigration law with an employee of the Department of Homeland Security sounds like serious business, taking negotiations with the president of Women in Federal Law Enforcement sounds no less intimidating. Salazar, who wears that hat as well, flew to Tampa for a week-long WIFLE conference last June.
“My opening speech was about supporting women in law enforcement, the need to encourage and support each other,” she explains, noting that the organization includes employees from federal agencies from all across the country — the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and others. “Since there aren’t that many of us, we need to help each other out.”
Back in Washington, she continued her summer classes — seven credits worth — in national security, negotiations and legal themes in literature. (She took classes the previous summer too, figuring she could use some flexibility later on as her law school career progressed.) And now, her grueling strategy has paid off. Though she has always worked a full-time job while earning her law degree, Salazar will still be able to graduate from law school in three years — instead of four, as she originally planned.
Which means that even if there were such a thing as a “senior slump” at Georgetown Law, Salazar wouldn’t know it.
“My classes are a little more intense… I don’t know if that’s just because of the classes I’ve chosen to take, but I feel like they require more studying than my second year,” says Salazar, who took immigration law, employment benefits, labor law and Introduction to Private Wealth Planning in the fall. In the spring, she’s taking evidence, administrative law, mediation and National Security and the Sea, not something that she has much experience with at the U.S. Border Patrol.
And while she admits that it takes a little extra effort sometimes to open the books — possibly because she now sees the end in sight — Salazar thinks she’s handled the three-year endurance test pretty well. “I had to learn time management and I think it’s stayed with me,” she says. “Sunday night, if I don’t have my work done, there’s no time except for the Metro — I don’t have free time. Sometimes there are some things that I don’t get to, but I do the best I can.”
She is open to opportunities but still plans to keep her job with the border patrol after she graduates, perhaps using her law degree to do pro bono work for others less fortunate. “I think that’s something that Georgetown really stresses; when I started my first year, there was always a message that you need to help people, you need to get out there,” she says. “They have such great opportunities at the pro bono office here that I just couldn’t take advantage of because I was working … I agree with them that it’s definitely something that’s important.”
Another World
Perhaps because of the sacrifices she’s had to make, Salazar appreciates the time she’s spent at Georgetown Law. “I received a wonderful opportunity to come to a really great school in D.C., that has access to so much, so many great professors and people with experience who come here, in the city where everything happens,” she says. “Close to the Capitol, you feel that energy. … It really opened my eyes to something I wasn’t aware of, another world that I’ve been exposed to.”
There are no lawyers yet in Salazar’s family either. And her mother, Estella Salazar, who she lives with, is all too familiar with the time and effort that Salazar has put in over the past three years — the early morning commutes from their home in Chantilly, the 10-hour workdays, two to four hours of class afterwards and the long, long Metro rides home at night.
My mother “just helps me so much, and she’s very proud of me and she’s also looking forward to my graduation,” Salazar says.
Any advice to 1Ls? “You really need to make an effort to get to know your classmates,” she says, “because they could really help you out. … That was one thing I wasn’t able to do because of work …”
And like many 3Ls, Salazar says she might have studied more (although she admits — and it’s hard to imagine — just when she could have found the time). Salazar is taking the bar, which will keep her studying for a little while longer. But she’s not sure yet what she’s going to do with all the free evenings and weekends she’ll have after that. “I think it will be pretty easy to get used to,” she says, laughing. “I’ll manage.”
