Attorney Nilda Rodriguez Havrilla has been selected as CLS’ new Litigation and Advocacy Director. Nilda, a graduate of Trinity College and Northeastern University School of Law, brings extensive experience to her new role. Nilda served as Managing Attorney of the CLS Housing Unit from 2011-2019 and as a CLS staff attorney from 2004-2011. Nilda is a James W. Cooper Fellow of the Connecticut Bar Foundation, has served on the board of the Friendship Service Center in New Britain, and currently serves on the board of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center.
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CLS Attorney Honored at Law Day Celebration
CLS Managing Attorney, Joanne Lewis, was named as the recipient of the New Britain Bar Association’s 2019 Law Day Award for Public Service.
CLS Announces New Deputy Director
We are pleased to announce that Attorney Anne Louise Blanchard has been selected as CLS’ new Deputy Director. Anne Louise brings extensive leadership experience to her new role, including more than a decade as CLS’ Litigation and Advocacy Director.
CLS Joins with Allies to Launch Immigration Funding Initiative
On August 16, leaders of the Connecticut bar launched an urgent new campaign to raise funds to provide expanded legal help for low-income immigrant children and families. CLS helped to design the Connecticut Lawyers for Immigration Justice campaign, and the proceeds will support our immigration advocacy and that of our partner organizations.
The campaign was announced by retired Chief Justice Chase Rogers and retired Superior Court Judge Robert Holzberg, a member of CLS’ board of directors, in an article in the Hartford Courant that also featured CLS Executive Director Deborah Witkin.
Connecticut Lawyers for Immigration Justice was inspired by CLS’ successful advocacy on behalf of two immigrant children who were detained and forcibly separated from their parents after they came to the United States seeking asylum. The children were detained in Connecticut, and CLS joined with Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic to win their release and reunification.
Click here to learn more about the suit and read the pleadings.
But tragically, the kind of representation that CLS and Yale Law School provided in those two cases is just not available to every immigrant family in Connecticut right now.
Statewide, all three of Connecticut’s full-service legal aid organizations – CLS, New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) and Greater Hartford Legal Aid (GHLA) – have seen a significant increase in demand for immigration legal services. The fundraising campaign will send 100% of every dollar raised to CLS, NHLAA, and GHLA, to be dedicated to immigration legal services.
CLS Wins Release and Reunification for Immigrant Children!
On Monday, July 16, CLS and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School successfully won release and reunification for two immigrant families who were detained and forcibly separated after they came to the United States seeking asylum.
CLS and the clinic filed emergency federal lawsuits on July 2 on behalf of 9-year-old JSR and 14-year-old VFB, who were detained in Connecticut by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. The children escaped persecution and violence in their home countries of Honduras and El Salvador only to be taken from their parents as part of the Trump Administration’s illegal “zero tolerance policy.”
Click here to learn more about the suit and read the pleadings.
The lawsuits, filed in the District Court of Connecticut, cited constitutional and statutory grounds, including the constitutional right to family integrity, in challenging the government practices that resulted in the harrowing dismantling of thousands of asylum-seeking families.
Click here to read a powerful editorial in the Hartford Courant applauding CLS’ work.
On July 13, 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Victor Bolden responded to the lawsuits by holding that the government’s conduct inflicted deep trauma and violated the children’s due process rights. The judge ordered the government to act immediately to remedy the trauma it caused the children. Three days later, the government transferred the parents from Texas to Connecticut, granted them parole, and reunited them with their children.
These are the first cases in the country brought by children, rather than parents, to challenge the Trump Administration’s forcible family separation policy. They are also the first cases in which a federal court held that the government’s systematic dissolution of immigrant families violates the children’s constitutional rights.
At CLS, the children were represented by a team that included Managing Attorney Joanne Lewis and staff attorneys Massiel Zucco-Himmelstein and Kelly Bonafe. “This is a victory for two families and for an entire community in Connecticut that united behind these children and in support of our state’s basic values of freedom, fairness, and family,” said attorney Zucco-Himmelstein. “We look forward to a time when every immigrant child has the kind of support and advocacy that won freedom for JSR and VFB.”
CLS began representing JSR and VFB as part of its ongoing advocacy on behalf of children who are detained at a federally-contracted shelter in eastern Connecticut. For more than a year, CLS has been visiting the shelter several times a month to meet with, and advocate for, the children who are detained there. Until May of this year, those children were all unaccompanied minors — children who came to the U.S. border without any parents or guardians. To date, JSR and VFB are the only children to arrive in Connecticut who were forcibly separated from their parents after crossing the border.
Click here to learn more about our work for unaccompanied immigrant children.