2024 Graduating Student Awards and Reflections

As we reach Commencement 2024, we want to highlight and celebrate the incredible graduating students who make up the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program community, both in the Immigration and Refugee Clinic and the Crimmigration Clinic as well as the Harvard Law School Immigration Project (HIP). These impressive students have contributed immensely to our Program, diligently working on behalf of our clients and dedicating their time to advancing immigrant justice.

We are pleased to share coverage of some of our graduating students below. These awards and profiles represent a small portion of the incredible student talent in HIRCP. We celebrate all of our students, including:

- Annie Whitney, with over 2,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as an Equal Justice Works fellow with the New York Legal Assistance Group
- Alizeh M. Sheikh, with over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as an Equal Justice Works fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center
- Dee Um, with over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as a Public Service Venture Fund Organization-Based Fellow with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
- Eliza Drury, with over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as Public Service Venture Fund Organization-Based Fellow with the European Court of Human Rights
- Tomás Arango, with over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as a Litigation Fellow with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance
- Simone Wallk, with over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours completed, will be serving as a Harvard Law Review fellow with the ACLU of the District of Columbia
- In addition, the following HIRCP graduating students completed over 1,000 Pro Bono Hours: Olivia den Dulk, Eliza Drury, Edwin Farley, Masooma Haider, Julia Hammond, Bomie Lee, Farris Peale, Beatriz Ramon, Robin Rivaux; Kristi Tanaka; Angeni Wang; Alyssa Zhang
- The following HIRCP graduating students completed over 2,000 Pro Bono Hours: Kamille Bernard and Elizabeth Olsen
- And our other HIRCP graduating students: Scarlett Aylsworth; Kamille Bernard; Shing-Shing Cao; Franklin Castro; Ximena Cespedes; Catherine Crevecoeur; Blythe Edwards; Soraia Esteves; Austin Fullmer; Lucy Huang; Angela Jang; Madina Jenks; Adam Mohsen-Breen; Alicia Mortenson; Kenna Pierce; Jose Rodriguez; Alexis Sandoval; Emily Steirman; Rebecca Suh; Linh Tang; Komal Toor; Linda Wen; Sam Huang; Deok Hyun (David) Kim; Jiwon Kim

Alexandra Kersley wins the CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student Award

My clinical experience has been the most meaningful part of my time at HLS, and I am incredibly grateful to the amazing instructors in the Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic and the Crimmigration Clinic,” says Kersley. “When I came to law school, I knew that I wanted to use my legal education for something that mattered. I can’t think of anything that could matter more than fighting alongside clients for the right to live their lives free from detention, and here in the United States.

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HIRCP Students receive Skadden Fellowships

Julio Colby and Sara Kamouni have been selected as recipients of the Skadden Fellowship. Colby and Kamouni have been avid participants in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRCP) clinics as students, doing critical client-centered legal work which inspired each of their fellowship projects, at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and The Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts, respectively. At TIRRC, [Colby] will work with Legal Director Spring Miller ’07, who herself was a Skadden Fellow in Nashville (her fellowship was at the Southern Migrant Legal Services in Tennessee, where Colby did a summer internship after his first year of law school).

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Bridget Pranzatelli honored with the Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award

Getting to directly represent clients who were so generous with their time, their stories, and their trust was, and is, the greatest honor of my life.

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HIRCP’s Detention Team fights for release of detained immigrants

By Mayra Espinoza-Martinez & Bridget Pranzatelli

Mainstream conversations about immigration often rely on a problematic binary that sorts immigrants into two buckets – first, hardworking model immigrants deserving of compassion, and second, disposable, undeserving others. Detained immigrants are almost always considered part of that second bucket. In the spring of 2024, under the supervision of clinical instructor Eleni Bakst, students from the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic and the Crimmigration Clinic participated in a new project that sought to challenge this over simplistic binary. The Detention Team, as they were called, specifically focused on direct representation of detained immigrants, securing release from detention and supporting in asylum cases. In the process, they got to join a beautiful community of clients and community partners in pursuit of a better future.

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‘There is always someone who will fight for them’ By Tara Djukanovic

Clients deserve to be seen, and celebrated, and fought for. They deserve to be told that yes, what happened to you was unjust and enraging—and you have a whole crowd of people who will fight to make it right. Not all clients get that—certainly not in immigration law, where counsel isn’t guaranteed. However, the beauty of the Immigration community at Harvard is that this experience wasn’t limited to my case. It’s through our instructors—Tiffany, Phil, Sabi, Cindy, and Eleni—that there are dozens of students willing to go to bat for hundreds of clients, making sure that they know that if nothing else, there is a team of people that care about them and that will work tirelessly to make sure that their voices are heard in the judicial system.

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Clinical Student Voices: Elevating the voices of others By Bennett Stehr

All three projects for the policy team shared an aspiration to empower immigrants facing an immensely complex and imposing bureaucratic system. And I will forever be grateful for how HIP helped me and the broader policy team appreciate that however stacked the odds were, our Harvard education gave us the resources necessary to not just help individuals beat those odds, but to also strive for structural change that might provide a more fair and equitable immigration system.

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Building bridges and power for immigrant communities

Julio Quiroz Colby has been advocating for immigrant rights since he was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, where, fluent in Spanish, he helped with translation services for asylum seekers at an immigrant and refugee legal services organization….“I was looking for where I could work directly with clients, but also engage in work that had systemic impact or at least a broader political-movement type goals,” says Colby, who, in addition to serving on the Harvard Law Review, was a student in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic and the Crimmigration Clinic.

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2024 Graduating Student Awards and Reflections

2024 Graduating Student Awards and Reflections

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HARVARD IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE CLINICAL PROGRAM