Catholic Values Spur a Lawyer’s Passion for Helping Immigrants

Much of what I do is motivated by faith. I think of the passage in Matthew 25, which says that your life will be measured by how you have helped the homeless, prisoners, hungry, sick, and strangers.

I was born and grew up in Washington. When I was in high school, our church was going through a $350,000

DONALD M. KERWIN JR. Age: 43 First nonprofit job: Associate attorney, Patton Boggs, Washington Current job: Executive director; Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (Clinic), Washington

renovation, which was protested by [activist] Mitch Snyder and members of his Community for Creative Non-Violence. The group’s point of view was, Why use resources to beautify a building when there are so many other needs? That was my first experience that one’s faith wasn’t exclusively an interior matter — it involved social issues and could have concrete implications for the use of resources and the way one might structure one’s life.

Another influence was Georgetown University, where I majored in theology. Georgetown does a really good job of educating people in the importance of service to the less fortunate — and not in a way that separates you from those people, but in a way that connects you to them. Service was viewed as a way to build community and as a way to see what you have in common with the people you serve.

After college I spent a year in Peru with a number of Georgetown grads. I was working as a volunteer in a soup kitchen for children in Chimbote, a diocese north of Lima. The economy wasn’t doing well, many people were out of work and very poor, and the children who came twice a day for meals were very needy.

I also was needy in that I wasn’t that good with the language, was away from friends and family, and in a very different culture. In that situation, you see your own vulnerabilities as well as those of the people you are trying to help.

After Peru, I went to law school at the University of Michigan and returned to Washington to seek a job in the nonprofit sector. But nothing worked out — I had loans to pay off and my wife was a Vista volunteer, so we didn’t have a lot of resources. There were certainly more jobs for attorneys in the private sector than with the nonprofits. As a result, I ended up working at Patton Boggs, which is one of the largest lobbying law firms in the country.

In retrospect, it was good that I worked for a big firm. I absolutely learned the big law-firm work ethic and the quality of work that is expected there. Those were good lessons, and Clinic has hired a number of people who worked for a period of time as associates with the big firms.

But I still wanted to work in the nonprofit world, and after three years I answered an ad in the newspaper and came to Clinic as a staff attorney. I went from representing three big clients to representing 5,600 Haitian boat people seeking political asylum, whom Clinic had committed to represent. I was heavily involved in supporting the Clinic and pro bono attorneys who directly represented those people. Originally they were only allowed into the United States for three months, but we were able to extend their period of parole and eventually got it up to one year. I prepared a 1,100-page exhibit on human rights in Haiti, which was used by attorneys and government adjudicators, and I directly represented individual asylum seekers.

After a year here, I was promoted to executive director in 1993. Ten years ago, Clinic had 17 independent Catholic “member” agencies. Currently we support 155 member agencies that operate legal offices on 260 sites. Our network represents more than 100,000 low-income immigrants annually. Considering that 10 percent of the U.S. population was not born here, there is a huge need for legal services for low-income immigrants — these people are the most vulnerable members of our society.

Although we receive much of our funding from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we are a separate entity. Furthermore, it is important to know what being a Catholic agency means and what it does not mean. It doesn’t mean that you have to be Catholic to work here or to receive our services. It does mean that the work we do is based on Catholic social teaching.

When it comes to immigrants, what Catholic social teaching means is that we need to identify with these people and the way they are moving from one country to another, because that parallels the spiritual journey everyone makes in their life, and also because newcomers enable us the opportunity to build a united human family. While Catholic social teaching acknowledges that sovereign states certainly have the right to restrict who comes to their country based on the common good, it also stresses that when migrants have made their home in this country, they are to be treated as our brothers and sisters. Furthermore, the common good cannot be furthered by denying these individuals their God-given human rights regardless of their immigration status.

Immigrants are people who through no fault of their own are in situations where they are completely controlled by their circumstances. I remember a teenage boy from Haiti, one of the boat people I represented for Clinic. His father had been an official with the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide before he was murdered by paramilitary forces. The child couldn’t safely get to his father’s body to bury him, and he ended up sleeping in the woods for months before coming over here with other boat people. I just wanted to give him a medal for being so courageous.