Speaker: Bree Bernwanger, Director, New York Unaccompanied Children & Immigrant Families Project, Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice; volunteer lawyer, CARA Pro Bono Project

Over the past three years, historically high numbers of Central American families—largely women with young children—have fled horrific and often gender-based violence to seek asylum and other humanitarian relief in the United States. Although the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has characterized these families’ flight as a “looming humanitarian crisis,” the United States has approached it as a threat to border security. Central to the United States’ policy response has been the expedited removal and mass detention of female-headed asylum-seeking families in remote, secure facilities operated by private prison companies. Bree Bernwanger, Director of the Feerick Center’s New York Unaccompanied Immigrant Children & Immigrant Families Project and a volunteer lawyer for the CARA Pro Bono Project, will outline how the “refugee” definition applies to these families, what family detention looks like on the ground, and the extraordinary efforts among the organized bar to provide removal defense to detained families and end the family detention system altogether.

As the director of the New York Unaccompanied Immigrant Children & Immigrant Families Project at Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice, Bree Bernwanger advocates for improved state and local policies impacting immigrant children and families settling in New York. She also volunteers, both on-the-ground and remotely, with the CARA Pro Bono Project to provide legal assistance to immigrant families detained in Dilley, Texas, and is developing service opportunities related to family immigration detention for Fordham Law School students and alumni. Before coming to Fordham, Bree was a Clinical Fellow at Albany Law School, where she taught and supervised law students handling domestic violence and immigration cases. She has worked as a litigation associate at Sidley Austin LLP and started her career as a fellow at the New York Civil Liberties Union. Bree received her J.D. from Georgetown Law and her B.A., with honors, from the University of Texas at Austin.

Kosher pizza will be served.

Photo credit: Carrie Sloan/Creative Commons

Brown Bag Lunch Series