All of us at Compañeros are incredibly excited to announce the launch of a brand-new program: the Compañeros Legal Assistance Program! This program will seek to ensure that all immigrant residents of our area have access to the legal assistance they need to obtain residency, citizenship, and more. This program has been a dream of ours for years, and thanks to your support we have been able to achieve it through several years of planning which included substantial energy and support from one of our former board members (Dr. Benjamin Waddell) who even took a year-long course on immigration law at Villanova University! This program is made possible by a special certification granted to us from the Department of Justice that allows us to provide legal services regarding immigration affairs through a program called “Recognition and Accreditation” that seeks to improve legal access around the country.
Legal assistance is an extremely crucial resource which drastically improves individuals’ success rate in navigating the immigration system. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, immigrants are twice as likely to obtain relief from detention and five times more likely to win their cases if they have legal assistance. But unlike other forms of legal aid, immigration-related legal assistance is not guaranteed or supplied by the court system, and defendants are not provided with any kind of public defender, neither for court representation nor navigation of the immigration system in general. Many individuals simply cannot afford the high fees that lawyers charge, and even for those that could, there are often none available in rural areas such as the Four Corners region. By providing low-cost legal assistance, our new Legal Assistance Program will be a huge step forward for our community in alleviating these conditions and improving the chances of success for all immigrant residents of our area.
We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired a new full-time staff member to develop and manage this program! Our new Legal Assistance Coordinator is Carolina Diaz, an individual whose personal experiences have led her to think critically about the society in which we live in and become an impactful maker of change. A political asylum seeker from Colombia, she has been involved in advocating for others ever since her father was kidnapped when she was only 15 years old which led her to fight to protect other Colombians affected by armed conflict. Eventually, she fled the violence in her country and in 2016 arrived in Durango, where she has lived ever since. In 2019 she was detained by Immigrations and Customs enforcement and had to navigate the immigration system, a painful and difficult episode that definitively changed the trajectory of her life in the United States but one through which she became stronger and more knowledgeable about immigration and successfully won her own political asylum. Today, Carolina continues to be committed to helping others, whether raising her family or fighting for the rights of her community, and she is excited to do so through her leadership of this program with the support and guidance of Dr. Waddell.
Legal assistance is an extremely crucial resource which drastically improves individuals’ success rate in navigating the immigration system. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, immigrants are twice as likely to obtain relief from detention and five times more likely to win their cases if they have legal assistance. But unlike other forms of legal aid, immigration-related legal assistance is not guaranteed or supplied by the court system, and defendants are not provided with any kind of public defender, neither for court representation nor navigation of the immigration system in general. Many individuals simply cannot afford the high fees that lawyers charge, and even for those that could, there are often none available in rural areas such as the Four Corners region. By providing low-cost legal assistance, our new Legal Assistance Program will be a huge step forward for our community in alleviating these conditions and improving the chances of success for all immigrant residents of our area.
We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired a new full-time staff member to develop and manage this program! Our new Legal Assistance Coordinator is Carolina Diaz, an individual whose personal experiences have led her to think critically about the society in which we live in and become an impactful maker of change. A political asylum seeker from Colombia, she has been involved in advocating for others ever since her father was kidnapped when she was only 15 years old which led her to fight to protect other Colombians affected by armed conflict. Eventually, she fled the violence in her country and in 2016 arrived in Durango, where she has lived ever since. In 2019 she was detained by Immigrations and Customs enforcement and had to navigate the immigration system, a painful and difficult episode that definitively changed the trajectory of her life in the United States but one through which she became stronger and more knowledgeable about immigration and successfully won her own political asylum. Today, Carolina continues to be committed to helping others, whether raising her family or fighting for the rights of her community, and she is excited to do so through her leadership of this program with the support and guidance of Dr. Waddell.
We are so grateful for your continued support of Compañeros, and know that we couldn’t have accomplished the creation of such an impactful program without you. If you’d like to support our Legal Assistance Program and the cause of providing the crucial resource of immigration legal assistance to all the immigrant residents in our area, considering making a donation to our work. You can use the button below to visit our donation page to make a one-time gift, a recurring donation, or a legacy contribution from a will, estate, or IRA.