Immigration, Refugees & Asylum

We have long focused on providing pro bono legal services to vulnerable immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the organizations that serve these populations.

In recent years, this work has become even more urgent given the rising number of assaults on the rights of our immigrant communities. We have made it part of our strategic mission to provide a systematic response.

We helped coordinate the legal community’s response to the crisis brought on by the forced separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and have helped to reunify hundreds of separated families. We were among the first to come to the aid of affected travelers at Dulles and JFK airports and among the last to leave when President Trump issued the first “travel ban” executive order.

We are deeply involved in challenges to anti-immigrant policies nationwide:

• As part of the national class action on behalf of separated parents, Ms. L. v. ICE, we chair a court-ordered steering committee on behalf of deported parents whose children remained in the U.S. Our work has resulted in the reunification of hundreds of children with their parents in their countries of origin and the placement of hundreds of others with U.S. sponsors, to allow these children to pursue their own immigration claims.  We continue to chair the committee, now responsible for locating and understanding the separation status of families separated before the June 2018 court order requiring reunification.
• We are co-counsel with the ACLU in a class action seeking damages on behalf of thousands of traumatized children and parents harmed by the Trump Administration’s separation of families at the southern border.
• Paul, Weiss and co-counsel are challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s third travel ban order after defeating a motion to dismiss in 2019 in a lawsuit we filed on behalf of four impacted individuals in Maryland two years earlier.
• Firm chair Brad Karp co-authored an Op-Ed for The New York Times, signed by 34 law firms, challenging the separation of migrant families at the border.
• We worked extensively with Catholic Charities of New York to locate and reunite families separated at the border, leading a multi-firm effort in June through August 2018, and are representing a number of individual parents and families in their immigration cases.
• We represent a group of individual plaintiffs in a Maryland case that resulted in a nationwide preliminary injunction of the travel ban. We continue to represent these clients in challenging the constitutionality of the travel ban order after the district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss.
• We represent a class of Indonesian Christians seeking to avoid deportation in a case in New Jersey, resulting in an ACLU of New Jersey award. We have represented dozens of women in their petitions to secure U Visas, special visas for victims of crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity.