Community Discussion on Deportation Abolition
Please join us in a dialogue centering the interplay between community centered-perspectives and Tulane Professor Laila L. Hlass's work on deportation abolition. Professor Laila L. Hlaas, a panelist at the Asylum Conference, has written on the lack of lawyers in the deportation abolition movement. In her forthcoming article, Lawyering from a Deportation Abolition Ethic, she addresses the tension lawyers face reconciling their duties as officers of the court and as advocates with their clients, needing to find a way to operate within a system they seek to abolish. Our community has worked within the broken immigration system on behalf of individual clients and, at the same time, challenged the system in creative ways. Join us for a public discussion on this dichotomy and refining focus of future advocacy efforts.
Professor Laila L. Hlass is a clinical law professor who teaches and writes about the convergence of the immigration enforcement and criminal legal regimes, immigrant children, and experiential pedagogy, and she co-directs Tulane’s Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Abena Abraham is an immigrant justice and community organizer, as well as a co-founder and co-director of the Black Immigrant Collective. Her family migrated to the US when she was a toddler. Moving to the US at a young age has impacted how she views the importance of community building. She is a Minnesotan of Ghanaian and Liberian descent.
Mirella Ceja-Orozco is an immigration attorney who wears a variety of hats, including as adjunct faculty with the Binger Center for New American's Federal Immigration Litigation Clinic, the current chair of the Minnesota/Dakotas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and co-director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
Montha Chum is the Executive Director of MN8, has worked in the areas of deportation defense, grassroots organizing, civic engagement, cross racial solidarity, youth leadership, violence prevention, court advocacy, and systems navigation.
Nekessa Opoti is a writer, communications’ strategist, and an immigrant justice organizer. She is also a co-founder and co-director of the Black Immigrant Collective. Her work lives at the intersections of Blackness, identity, migration and queerness. She loves mangoes, eggplants and words.