UNLV legal clinic to aid immigrants

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2003 | 11:02 a.m.

A law clinic offering free legal assistance to immigrants was scheduled to open today at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, making the school one of the few in the nation to host such a center.

The clinic will handle a low volume of cases in different areas of immigration law, said David Thronson, law professor and director of the clinic -- including cases involving foster children, abused women, deportation and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It will be staffed by Thronson and seven law students.

The clinic will also offer up-to-date legal information in Spanish and English to nonprofit organizations that work with immigrants throughout the Las Vegas Valley, Thronson said.

The project at UNLV's Boyd School of Law is innovative, but it arrives with controversy as well.

"There are very few such clinics in the nation -- far fewer than desperately needed by the immigrant population," said Lucas Guttentag, a veteran of immigration law and director for the national Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Immigrants don't have the same right to counsel as citizens and in many cases people are deported without any legal assistance, even when they have compelling cases," Guttentag said.

Las Vegas attorney Peter Ashman, head of the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said "there is a huge demand (locally) for legal assistance for those who may not otherwise be able to afford it."

News of the clinic's opening wasn't greeted as enthusiastically by other immigration experts nationwide, however.

Mark Krikorian, director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank favoring tighter immigration controls, said that though "the concept (of the clinic) is unremarkable ... the operation is another thing."

Immigration law programs at universities around the country "tend to be staffed by people who have visceral opposition to any idea of immigration control," Krikorian said.

"I suspect it might be a way for illegal aliens to obstruct enforcement of immigration law," he said.

But Thronson said that U.S. citizens or residents are involved in many immigration cases, petitioning for family members that aren't legal. And the clinic will be working within the law, not against it, he said.

"We've experienced a tremendous growth in the immigrant population in our city and with that come immigration law issues -- be that people wanting to reunify families or go from being residents to citizens," he said.

Though no figures exist on the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the valley, estimates range from 60,000 to 120,000.

Ashman said that the valley is full of families who are divided by such immigration issues.

"Many families in this community have a citizen family member and an undocumented person and it's important for the whole community to keep these families together," he said.