Abraham Jose Cepeda
HIAS and Council Migration Services
in partnership with the Community Justice Project
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This year my MLK internship was a bit different than my first year. I was working on behalf of the PA Legal Aid Network as an MLK intern but was stationed at a non-profit organization in Philadelphia named HIAS and Council Immigration Services. My work was exclusively limited to immigration law; with that said, there is nothing exclusive about immigration law. I started my internship super excited. I was in a new city (even though it was Philadelphia). I was going to work in an area of law which I am very interested in, and I was able to continue my work in public interest. Soon my excitement turned into frustration. The HIAS office is full of dedicated attorneys and paralegals who are working hard to help the low income immigrant community but there is too much demand and many people have to be turned away or put on a long wait list. This kind of gap between the amount of legal services offered for immigrants and the amount of need out there bothered me because it highlighted the lack of protection given to this segment of the community.

In America, a country built by immigrants, the corrupt Drum Major instinct of the majority has worked to marginalize this group. The Majority has grown to fear that new immigrant groups will take their slots in society, their jobs, and their status. That fear has translated into harsh immigration laws that have left immigrants with very few rights. The current economic conditions have further added to that fear and have created a system where the government is aggressively hunting immigrants, something that had been unheard of in our country’s history.

Unlike other public interest clients that I’ve dealt with, the clients at HIAS had more than one barrier to their access to justice. These are men and women who are not only limited in their access to justice by their finances and their language skills but also by a national climate which every day becomes more inhospitable and tries to blame them for the current state of the American Empire. My clients, both legal immigrants and illegal immigrants, face laws which get harsher every time they are reviewed by Congress. They face unclear laws which lawyers can barely decipher and to top it off they receive almost no constitutional protections. These men and women have to worry that a simple traffic stop could lead to a deportation hearing, that their family will be split up and that they will have to take their children and go back to countries that are not safe. While they’re suffering and living in fear, the political rhetoric labels them criminals. This rhetoric has found sympathetic ears in politicians on both side of the aisle who are worried about elections.

Seeing these clients, their issues and what they are willing to risk in order to attain a better life gave my Drum Major the boost it needed. I saw the same kind of determination in them that I saw in my parents growing up, the kind of determination which has always had my Drum Major beating to an elaborate beat. These immigrants both legal and illegal had to change their setting, their traditions and many times, their language, to come here and live in the shadows of society in order to better their lives and the lives of their families in their native countries. This kind of ambition is what this country was built on – a true Drum Major instinct.

This experience really allowed me to take a step back and think about how we get caught up in our lives and our ambitions and we allow our drum major instinct to get corrupted, we start thinking only about perfecting our beat and not about the message that our beat is supposed to relay to the troops. If we, as educated individuals are tasked with being the mouthpiece of society we must be like the drum major, coordinate our voices and actions to help those who cannot be heard on their own. Attorneys in private practice and in public service together must work to help those marginalized by the system get the message of their struggle and their value out to the masses. We who are given the opportunity to truly see the injustices that our system places on the poor, the uneducated, and those on the fringes of society, have the responsibility to use our beats to relay their afflictions to those who have no way of knowing what’s going on. Only if the masses know and care about what’s happening, will congress make the changes necessary to fix the system.

 I was reprimanded by some of my fellow interns for having a long essay at the end of my internship last year, so I will stop now and sum-up my experience in this last paragraph. This internship was uncomfortable because Philadelphia traffic made my 11 mile commute last an hour each way. It was cramped because I worked in an office with more people than space where nobody has a set spot. It was financially burdensome because two apartments plus Philadelphia parking cost about as much as our stipend. But more than that, it was amazing because it allowed me to help my community, people who were socially and economically in the same position as I was growing up. It was fulfilling because I was able to offer clarity, help and provide guidance to people of my same background, culture and ethnicity. It was heartwarming because I was able to see the life changing impact in client’s lives. It was challenging because navigating through the INA is a great workout for anyone’s intellect, and lastly, it was “educational” because no matter what field of law I end up practicing, the patience this job forcefully instilled in me when dealing with clients and government bureaucracy is sure to be indispensable.