How a Canadian-Born Lawyer Found a Mission in Helping Immigrants Attain Liberty

ENTRY LEVEL

Cheryl Little

Age: 55

First job: Staff attorney, Haitian Refugee Center, Miami

Current job: Co-founder and executive director, Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, Miami

I was born in Montreal and raised in New Brunswick, but when I was in college, my parents, who had relatives in Coral Gables, Fla., decided to move to the United States. I ended up joining them and eventually got my undergraduate degree from Florida International University, where I had two majors: criminal justice and social work. After college, I spent some time in Europe, and I also owned two antique stores. But I decided to go to law school because I knew I wanted to do public-interest work.

During my third year of law school, I wrote a paper about the treatment of Haitian refugees in South Florida. These were people who were fleeing a brutal dictatorship, but our government was not treating them particularly well and was actually discriminating against them. Part of the problem was that Haiti was not a communist country and therefore these refugees did not garner the same level of concern as other refugees did. Furthermore, they did not have a lot of political clout, nor were they particularly well-educated or wealthy.

After I graduated from the University of Miami School of Law in 1985, I went to work for the Haitian Refugee Center as a staff attorney. We assisted asylum seekers with their claims and looked into discrimination against these people. Much of our concern focused on the fact that these individuals were often indefinitely detained in jail and frequently had no access to attorneys who spoke Creole, the refugees’ primary language.

Then, in 1986, two things happened that greatly affected the Haitian community: President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled Haiti, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 went into effect. As a result, Haitians both here and abroad were empowered, having overthrown a 29-year dictatorship.

One of the programs under the new amnesty law affected farmworkers, many of whom were Haitian. Although many of our clients were now eligible for U.S. residency, they were not being treated fairly by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. For instance, these Haitian farmworkers — and there were tens of thousands of them — were being required to produce an excessive number of documents that were not required of others seeking residency permits. In addition, certain farmworkers’ managers were on an INS list and if you were a Haitian who worked for one of these managers , your application was automatically suspect.

To try to help farmworkers, the Haitian Refugee Center filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of these people, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And we won. I remember to this day when we got word to the community that the highest court in this country supported them. It was an evening of absolute joy. To have the Supreme Court rule in favor of the Haitians was something they had never even dreamed of. If there was anything I learned from that work, it was never, never, never give up.

I also learned the importance of protecting the basic rights of immigrants — they are easy scapegoats when this country is facing difficult economic times or in the wake of terrorist events, such as the Oklahoma City bombing. These are vulnerable people who are desperately trying to achieve liberty and justice. They face discrimination, they have to deal with intricate and ever-changing immigration laws, with a lack of affordable legal representation, and oftentimes just a lack of understanding and compassion.

What led me to co-found the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which I did in 1996 with the help of two Catholic nuns who were also attorneys, was that Congress was about to pass a law that would have made it virtually impossible for federally funded legal-service agencies to provide assistance to undocumented immigrants. Therefore, we formed this new organization to continue to help people who were eligible to become U.S. residents but did not yet have the proper documentation. When we opened our doors, after getting money from the Ford Foundation and the Florida Bar Foundation, we had a staff of nine and one office. Today we have four offices and a staff of 45.

One of our most important achievements has been the filing of three lawsuits in federal court on behalf of immigrants who had applied to become American citizens, but were being denied that opportunity. In two cases we received a favorable settlement with the INS, and in the third case, the court ordered the INS to promptly review the cases of our plaintiffs.

I’m never going to stop my work on behalf of immigrants. When I became an American citizen myself last year, I was reminded of how important this work is. At the swearing-in ceremony, I saw so much absolute happiness in the faces of those around me. Here were the huddled masses being given an opportunity to achieve a life where there really is liberty and justice for all. — As told to Mary E. Medland

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