Think Immigration: Teaching in the Storm: Running an Immigration Clinic While Due Process and the Rule of Law Are Under Attack

This blog post is part of a multi-part series from members of the AILA Rule of Law (AROL) Task Force; for more information about AROL look to Chair Jerry Grzeca’s initial blog post which is a handy guide to its purpose, priorities, and work.

The law is not what the textbooks say it is anymore. Usually that lesson arrives gently, over a semester or two, as students discover that good lawyers learn to work in the doctrinal gray areas. What's different now, for those of us teaching immigration clinics, is the speed and scale of that instability, and the fact that it’s no longer just the substantive rules. It has reached the procedural guarantees the whole system depends on.

Immigration law students and new lawyers have always faced a familiar set of hurdles: mastering a dense statutory scheme, learning to build trust with clients, developing written and oral advocacy skills. Our students carry all of that, plus a harder question underneath it: whether the legal system is built to fail the people they represent. And if so, what is their role in that system? If the rule of law is under attack, why become a lawyer at all?

Despite challenges that can feel insurmountable, this work matters more now, not less, and so does the role immigration clinics play in helping students sit with these questions rather than look away from them.

Dealing with Doctrinal Whack-a-Mole

Law school clinics focus largely on teaching lawyering skills: how to read a law or policy, apply it to our clients’ facts, and predict an outcome. That premise assumes the rule will still mean roughly the same thing by the time the case resolves. But while immigration law has never been stable, those shifts are on a different order of magnitude.

Enforcement priorities change abruptly. The BIA issues a Friday afternoon bombshell. Access to certain forms of relief narrows without warning. The Supreme Court fails to uphold protections.

When I taught a crash course on habeas corpus law in January 2026, I told the students not to be too wedded to what they’d just learned because “the law will change by the end of the semester.” And indeed, by mid-semester, the circuit court issued a decision cutting off an avenue of habeas corpus relief for individuals detained mandatorily under INA § 235(b)(2)(A). We spent the rest of the semester trying to argue around that decision for our clients languishing in detention.

Clinical professors famously love the question, “What do you think?” But these days, this question is truly a joint thought exercise as our expertise vanishes with each new policy, priority, or judicial decision. It’s no longer just a teaching technique. For students, this can be destabilizing. And for me, too. As their supervisor, I’m not teaching students what the law is, but how to hold the law loosely, to build in contingency, to learn on the fly, and then to keep re-checking whether the legal and procedural ground is still there. That's an advanced lawyering skill under any circumstances. Asking a 2L or 3L to develop it in their first client-facing semester is a real challenge.

Teaching zealous advocacy without teaching despair

Our students often join clinic because they want to pursue public interest law or learn skills to build a pro bono practice while in corporate law. Many of our students also join because of their own immigration story, or that of their family. In this way, our clinics attract some of the most mission-driven students in law school.

That's a gift… and a vulnerability.

When students watch a client’s case get derailed by ICE’s cruelty, the immigration court’s lack of due process, or USCIS’s ungodly delays, it doesn’t just harm the client and the case. The students start to question whether they’ve picked the right profession. In my two years teaching, I’ve talked with several students asking, “what is the point?” Why choose this profession when it is being tested daily with attacks on lawyers, law firms, and legal institutions?

Part of the job now is naming that feeling honestly, rather than smiling and “it’s okay”-ing over it. As a Gen X-er who went to law school in the mid-2000s, naming these emotions isn’t always my first instinct. And certainly, slowing down to have these important conversations is half the battle. But students deserve a supervisor who says plainly: yes, this is different from what your doctrinal classes assume, and yes, it is going to be frustrating in ways that aren't your fault, and yes, the system fails on so many levels. I’ve learned that the alternative — pretending the system is functioning — teaches students to distrust their own instincts, which is worse for their formation as lawyers than the disappointment itself.

At the same time, clinics can't become spaces of pure lamentation. In this regard, my students are teachers and I’m the student. Their joy and whimsy have buoyed my spirits on the days of sadness and sleep deprivation, like when they brought in a cookie cake with “yay TROs!” scrolled in sugary frosting to celebrate success on behalf of international students whose SEVIS records were terminated. Or the wall of Post-It notes, memorializing wins and client joys and funny quotes and kind emails and colorful words for ICE. But maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned from them is the way they show up for each other, carving out intentional time to check-in and lean on each other. They’ve created a close-knit community of resilient litigators grappling with the tough questions and the tough losses.

What clinics can still teach — and why it matters more, not less

None of this is an argument for teaching less rigorously or retreating to safer doctrinal terrain. If anything, this moment sharpens the case for clinical education. Students who learn to build a factual record under these conditions, to communicate with a frightened client sitting in detention, to collaborate with community organizations, and to keep fighting even when the outcome is bleak are learning exactly the skills the profession needs more of, not less.

Clinics can also teach something that doesn't show up on a syllabus: what it looks like for a lawyer to keep working diligently and honestly when the system around them is under strain. (Or even crumbling.) Our students watch how the attorneys around them respond to setbacks, whether with cynicism, with denial, or with a steady insistence on doing the next right thing for the client in front of them. In return, they’ve taught me—the Gen X-er who doesn’t always slow down to feel her feelings—to find joy while working in a system designed to create despair.

Please note: These views are the author’s personal views and don’t represent the views of her university.