Last semester, I worked as a student attorney in my law school’s political asylum clinic. Self-proclaimed as an “intimate public interest law firm,” the program prides itself on a highly immersive curriculum. From beginning to end, students are expected to put on a practitioner hat, and apply the many legal doctrines and skills acquired during their educational journey. For me, as a then-first semester 3L, I could not wait. I was eager, impatient even, to finally begin expanding my law school experience beyond the confining, hyper-academic walls of the classroom. And there was no better way to do so than through this clinic in particular—the same one that brought me to Georgetown. 

I am the daughter of two Black-undocumented immigrants. Up until 5th grade, I honestly had no idea what that even meant. I don’t suspect that my parents necessarily hid their status from my siblings and I, but perhaps that it was a desperate attempt to maintain a fleeting sense of normalcy. While that blissful ignorance treated me well until the ripe age of 10, the latter part of my childhood consisted of anxiously asking Allah to give mommy and daddy “papers” and translating for them at neverending attorney consultation meetings. It’s funny because in law school, we often joke about how lawyers should speak more in everyday language. Since matriculating, I now think about the irony of it all: how I spent so much time romanticizing the day when my tongue could finally carry the weight of those legalese, just to now arrive and be told the importance of unlearning such an unnatural way of speaking. Although frustrating, it is equally the perfect anecdote for the contrast between bold aspirations of non-white students, versus the reality of inherently oppressive systems that await our arrival.

Frankly, I am no exception to the wide-eyed law school applicant stereotype who was keen on disrupting the [insert name here] system. I still vividly remember sitting down years ago to dress up some of the most traumatic periods of my life in strategic language and sexy punctuation in a personal statement for absolute strangers to consume.

This was only the second time I had ever seen her cry. But unlike the first time, years ago, this time I would not be privileged to just walk away. Instead, I had to face the harsh truth that both my parents are undocumented. The letter warned my mother that in 180 days, she would no longer be able to call this country home. This would mark the beginning of a long and arduous fight within the same system that my siblings and I had been subject to trauma at the hands of, yet whose name I did not know at the time: immigration.

“It would all pay off in the end,” I remember chanting to myself during the brutal time that is the law school application cycle. Once I could just get behind the exclusive doors of the law, I reasoned, I would be able to help people—to help mommy and daddy. 

Needless to say, I was elated when I found out I was accepted into the same clinic that would allow me to materialize the goals that brought me to law school. From the moment I received the email, I began brainstorming creative ways to ask my professors if I could represent a Black asylum seeker. With their permission, I was well on my way to learning the ins and outs of an anti-immigrant regime in hopes of using it to facilitate relief and protection for my client. It may seem like a contradiction at first, and that is primarily because it is. Admittedly, clinic was not the first time I felt trapped in the paradox that is the American legal system. 

But for whatever reason, this experience was different. This time, it felt more personal in a way that I would not allow myself to casually shake off with a personal reminder like “. . . the system isn’t broken, it was built this way.” My frustrations with a racist, centuries-old legal system, although unquestionably valid, would often begin and end there. Often overwhelmed by the beast that is the law, one of the essential ways I would fend off feelings of helplessness was by contextualizing my own impact: Black | African | Immigrant | Muslim. 

So maybe that’s exactly why the failures of my clinical experience stung so much. It brought me face to face with the fact that the same law schools that students of color are often putting so much faith in to equip us with tools of social change, are equally disempowering us.

Specifically, the law school clinic model speaks to how law schools have continued to show a blatant disregard for the ways in which Black students, students of color, and first-generation Americans are disproportionately positioned to immerse ourselves in academic exercises with our literal communities on the line. For example, the lack of comprehensive trauma-focused training and resources in these programs undermine law schools’ supposed commitment to holistic pro bono work. While law schools already tend to default in counseling services that are remotely diverse, the lack of it becomes even more alarming when student attorneys are forced to completely rely on the safe spaces we create for ourselves. Notoriously of them all, the blatant refusal to wean off grading curves for clinics is to endorse increased emotional taxation on the same students working in, with and around systems that actively harm us. Not to mention, these same students are repeatedly expected to perform free labor that helps these same school administrators get it right—anything from challenging faculty appointments to demanding racist curricula be corrected. 

Ultimately, to repeatedly reduce direct services work to pedagogy in these ways is one of the most violent methodologies there is. It is to say to students who see themselves in the work that while empathy is essential in people-lawyering, it comes second to “objectivity”.  

Thrust into classroom debates about “reform” versus “revolution,” we regularly find ourselves scrambling to have historical Supreme Court opinions on hand because our communal narratives will never be enough. The examples of racist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic (to name a few) rhetoric knows no end behind the change-resistant doors of prestigious law schools. And while clinical programs are just the tip of the iceberg, they are perfectly suited to dismantle the law school experience we have repeatedly normalized. 

As my time in law school finally comes to an end, I admit that I am really looking forward to being an attorney. In addition to the great pride I take in how much sacrifice was required for me to be here, I remain emboldened by the possibility of serving the Black immigrant community that brought me here. 

That’s really the dissonance in all of this: that although law school as it exists today does not work for us, we make it work. Like we always have. 

Still, law schools perpetuate the complacency of systems that inherently do not work yet defends itself by pointing to the rare times when it does. The burden is not ours to carry, and we are long overdue for a paradigm shift.