January 2025

How we're working and how you can help

View this email in your browser VAAP NEWSLETTER January 2025 CONTINUED OOPS! FORGOT A FEW THINGS TOMORROW! Join Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante this Saturday for a Spanish-language Know Your Rights and base-building event at 60 Lake Street in Burlington from 6:30pm to 9pm. All are welcome for this Spanish-language gathering focused on how immigrant communities can defend and expand their rights in Vermont. Delicious food and childcare available! ALSO, they are accepting calls for immigration support on their teleayuda/helpline at 802-881-7229. Spread the word! ALSO! Winooski Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria and groups like the Education Justice Coalition, Migrant Justice, and VAAP are preparing for promised anti-immigrant policies under the new federal administration, including the promise to revoke policies that make schools “sensitive zones” safe from ICE raids. Learn more about how to support Winooski's efforts and how to bring the model safe schools policy to your community! And while we're here: reminder to view Vermont Language Justice Project's recordings of two Know Your Rights sessions VAAP co-delivered with Association of Africans Living in VT attorney Nathan Virag. We delivered the sessions in Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, and English last month and are gathering resources to deliver future presentations in other languages and in other parts of the state. Meanwhile, please help us share these videos widely! And stay tuned for an upcoming limited-scope legal assistance clinic VAAP is planning to deliver in partnership with AALV.  Thanks for reading and for all you do! VAAP NEWSLETTER January 2025 (circulated earlier) Vermont Asylum Assistance Project (VAAP) is a legal services and technical assistance organization that exists to mentor no-cost and low-cost immigration lawyers and legal workers; educate and serve VT immigrants and community members; coordinate maximal impact across sectors and governments; and advocate to protect immigrants’ rights. FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR To our subscribers and partners: thank you. Our few-but-fierce VAAP team was blown away by your outpouring of collaboration and care these last weeks. We are so fortunate to be in community with such incredible clients, partners, and leaders as we share in the work of mitigating harm into 2025. This week VAAP completed Continuing Legal Education on minding ethical practice in times of great uncertainty. National Immigration Project director and instructor Vickie Nielson (who offered me my first law job back in 2015!) called on us to not back down from the highly complex and admittedly risky legal work ahead. She reminded participants how strong we are to be staring down this defining civil rights issue of our time. We left the training feeling confident that, with your continued support and partnership, VAAP is prepared to meet this moment and more. Below, you'll learn we're working with regional and national communities of practice to ensure Vermont's seamless access to vetted self-help resources and subject matter expertise. We're expanding the format and scope of educational materials on our growing multilingual website, and sharing technical assistance with clients, volunteers, leaders, and beyond. Our flexibility is keeping us responsive to emerging community needs, and our focus on accountability will help us foster equitable access to quality services and information. But we need your help! We need allies to familiarize yourselves with VAAP's self-help resources and programming and help us spread the word, so impacted community members can do the same. We need legal and language access volunteers to stay patient with our start-up learning curve and stay open to emerging technology, so we can continue mobilizing legal resources when and where they are needed most. Speaking of resources, we need partners who can contribute financially to help us replace the tenuous federal funding on which our program currently relies. Remember: we have been here before and we know how to fight, and we'll get through this. Read on for practice updates, advisories and opinions, answers to frequently asked questions, save the dates, and more.   Thanks for all you do! Jill Martin Diaz, Esq.  SUPPORT OUR WORK Every contribution, of any amount, keeps us focused on immigration lawyering at this pivotal moment in Vermont's immigration history. We're a small advocacy staff working to meet ever-increasing demands without the help of support staff. Join the fight against anti-immigrant censorship and austerity and donate to VAAP today. Donate to VAAP WEBSITE UPDATES Absent a state-based Office of New Americans equivalent to serve as Vermont's legal information clearinghouse, VAAP is growing the scope and content of our multilingual educational website for easier reference by immigrant communities, service providers, and legal advocates alike. Visit our website at www.vaapvt.org. So far, we've bolstered our community- and attorney-facing virtual libraries and launched click-through references to the different legal and social sectors supporting VT's immigrant communities. We will continue to grow and reorganize both resources in the time to come. Any omissions or errors were made in good faith, and we always welcome corrections or opt-outs from anyone at anytime. Our request is that you please join us in encouraging folks to visit our website as a first step for the best available information at any given time, to reduce VAAP's large call/email volume and to minimize the risk of exacerbating misinformation by circulating handouts that will quickly become stale. Our website content is available in English, Spanish, French, Dari, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese. Site visitors can adjust the language of any page using the translator widget at the top right corner. We recommend new visitors review the brief English-language video tour of the website on our landing page. Access the library Between monthly newsletters, don't forget to visit our blog for the latest law, policy, and practice updates from VAAP. This month's posts included December and January roundup of local immigration news and an invitation to VAAP's and AALV's Know Your Rights presentations on 12/4 in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole, which Vermont Language Justice Project recorded and published here.  This month's celebrations and publications included: VAAP featured in Seven Days and published in Seven Days and VT Digger IJC awards VAAP our third IJC Fellow VAAP to teach service learning to 30 at the UVM Department of Social Work VAAP partners with UVM's History Department to prepare country conditions evidence for Vermont's most common asylum seeker fact patterns VAAP's virtual clinics serve over 35 asylum seekers in December VAAP appointed to VT Treasurer Mike Pieciak's Federal Transition Task Force VAAP and CASP present to 150+ at Brattleboro community forum Practice alerts and evolving answers to frequently asked questions included: January 20th Prep Practice Alert  December talking points on 2025 prep State-based interventions VT can consider Know Your Responsibilities in VT Family planning Protecting immigrant youth Sanctuary schools Temporary status What happens after applying for asylum Expanded educational programming for lawyers and service providers Immigration and Work Ethics and nonprofit compliance in uncertain times Myth-busting misinformation and disinformation This was in addition to the numerous multimedia and multilingual resources we curated on our community- and attorney-facing resource libraries.  Read the blog REQUESTING LEGAL HELP VAAP is facing a surge in urgent cases; difficulty balancing intake communications with existing attorney-client duties; and unexpectedly time-intensive post-clinic legal work. To address these challenges, we’ve paused new intakes to catch up on existing professional duties EXCEPT for Unaccompanied Children in removal proceedings and Afghan nationals, for whom we have restricted funding to serve. Unfortunately, this means we are no longer maintaining a general intake waitlist or responding directly to new requests for legal help. If folks call or email us to request help this month, we are unlikely to be able to respond. If you submitted an intake request in 2024, we are working to contact you as resources allow, but we cannot guarantee a response or assistance due to the high volume of cases. We publish our referral list of trusted no-cost and free-for-service immigration providers on our website (scroll down for referrals).  That said, we remain committed to serving new immigrant clients this winter and spring. For potential clients seeking new humanitarian immigration legal help from VAAP, we request that you let your social service providers know (or that you get in touch with them for the first time) so they can connect you with upcoming VAAP services.  In turn, social service providers can can request a virtual or onsite legal help clinic from VAAP by emailing info@vaapvt.org. Social service providers can also contact us to get added to our click-through referral page! Clinics are designed to provide limited-scope, harm-reducing immigration legal assistance to noncitizen Vermonters at risk of removal. We are working hard to increase our capacity and share your frustration with the growing access-to-justice gap facing low-income Vermonters! Make your unmet immigration legal needs known to Vermont: report unmet needs to the State Refugee Office at Tracy.Dolan@vermont.gov and the Office of Racial Equity at AOA.ORE@vermont.gov, who report to the Governor; as well as to Legal Services Vermont's partner referral portal, who reports intake requests and responses to the Vermont Judiciary. Report an ICE Arrest We're already seeing an uptick in ICE enforcement in VT this week. If you witness ICE or CBP arrest activity in Vermont, please complete this form so VAAP can track practices and incorporate patterns into our education and advocacy work. Note reporting enforcement activity using this form is NOT a request for legal help but will help us gather data to support our resource generation! LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES TODAY! Join VAAP staff at the Vermont Bar Association Mid-Winter Thaw Conference for a 90-minute 1.5MCLE-DEI session exploring actionable strategies for creating legal work environments that honor and uplift individuals of all races, ethnicities, religions, national origins, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities. Participants will learn from VAAP’s approach to integrating and supporting diverse team members to navigate bringing their whole selves to representing diverse clients, while addressing the unique challenges of immigration lawyering in 2025. Together, we’ll discuss practical steps to eliminate bias, expand accessibility, and build legal workplaces where everyone—not just clients but colleagues, too—can thrive. See you there! Unless it's not your vibe! VT providers of legal and social services: please hold your questions and join VAAP and a community of practitioners at our recurring rounds meetings! Open to all VT legal and lay providers from the public, private, or volunteer sectors. Upcoming legal meetings are January 23 & 28 and February 20 & 12. Upcoming lay meetings are January 21 & 30 and February 18 & 27. The National Immigration Project cites engagement with communities of practice as the number one way we can best support our clients and each other in the uncertainty ahead! Starting in January 2025, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Tennessee Immigration and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) will be launching a seven-part webinar training series on workplace raids resistance and response.  The trainings will cover all facets of raids response from a power-building perspective and will be led by speakers with on-the-ground experience responding to workplace raids, including our experience responding to the 2018 raid at TN's Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant. Events calendar VOLUNTEERING OPPORTUNITIES Huge THANKS to VAAP Language Access Volunteer Sara Stowell of Proctorsville for joining executive director Jill Martin Diaz and legal fellow Emma Matters-Wood in co-publishing VT Digger commentary calling for more responsible reporting on immigrant workforce and housing issues! Read the full piece here and accompanying Seven Days Letter to the Editor here. We're getting great engagement from the publishers themselves and connecting Princeton University's Eviction Lab with VT housing advocates to mount a systematic response for what we expect will be a growing eviction pattern as ICE worksite raids leave families behind without income.   "If Vermont is to address its economic challenges, it must first tackle the systemic barriers that hinder workers’ ability to live here and thrive. This includes ensuring access to affordable housing, fair wages and pathways to regularized work authorization and immigration status. Additionally, robust protections for all workers, regardless of status or manner of arrival, are essential to creating a just and sustainable workforce." As you can see, donating money is not the only way to support VAAP's mission; the success of our legal work also relies on people generously donating their time! In particular, we seek lawyers and legal workers interested in helping an asylum seeker to file their initial application, or fielding questions at a local Know Your Rights forum. We also seek fluent multilingual language access volunteers interested in interpreting between lawyers and clients during their case meetings (Spanish is in highest demand followed by French). No experience necessary! Whatever your background, we'll provide you with resources to guide your work. Stay tuned for volunteer sign up forms on this page of our website which should facilitate our ability to respond to offers and inquires more timely! In the kind words of returning VAAP volunteer attorney, Don Woodworth, of Central Vermont:    "In a nutshell, I wish to share my privilege - privilege that has allowed me to study and work to become an attorney who speaks fluent Spanish, to assist people to avoid a sealed fate in their own countries by gaining asylum to live here, contributing to Vermont culturally and, lest we forget, economically. I think that most residents in the United States are here by virtue of immigration, perhaps motivated by some of the same reasons that drives people to seek asylum here today (albeit perhaps under a very different context)."   Volunteer FAQs CONNECTING CULTURES' CORNER We are excited to continue sharing VAAP newsletter and blog space with our multidisciplinary partners at Connecting Cultures, with whom VAAP collaborates closely to provide culturally relevant and trauma-informed welcoming and resettlement services. This round of Connecting Cultures' Corner, we feature a country profile on Somalia; a clinician spotlight; upcoming events from partner organizations; and more. We thank Connecting Cultures (formally known as New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma or NESTT) for paving the way for VAAP to exist and supporting us with funding to deliver legal services and community education. Check out our blog to learn more! Connecting Cultures THANK YOU FROM OUR TEAM Please join us in extending a warm welcome to our newest board member and incoming Treasurer Juan Mejias! Juan works as Mascoma Bank's Community Relationship Banker and previously managed the M&T South Burlington Branch. Juan is no stranger to the experience of accessing humanitarian immigration pathways and building a new life and enterprise in Vermont. In Juan's words, after thoroughly reviewing VAAP's website, newsletters, and social media, he described feeling called to our mission given his own recent immigration experience. He says he’s eager to pay forward the resettlement supports he received along the immigration journey that brought him to New England and, ultimately, to Vermont. He expresses feeling eager to inspire other newly arrived, English learning immigrants to dream big for their futures, given all that he has achieved in VT in few short three years. Thank you for joining us, Juan!  Endless thanks to our outgoing Treasurer Caitlin Jenness who was absolutely instrumental to VAAP's survival and success during our first year of incorporation. Caitlin works as the Director of Finance at Evernorth and previously worked as C.F.O. for several prominent mission-driven local businesses. During her tenure as VAAP Treasurer, Caitlin went above and beyond to help ensure the smooth and sustainable development of VAAP operations and fiscal management. Thanks to Caitlin's dedication to VAAP, we are entering our second year a bigger, stronger, and more sustainable organization. We wish you well, Caitlin, and we are eternally grateful for all your contributions!    Interested in joining our incredible board? See our vacancies on Common Good VT and apply now!  Donate to VAAP   Vermont Asylum Assistance Project  P.O. Box 814, Elmwood Ave, Burlington, VT 05402 802-999-5654 ‖ info@vaapvt.org ‖ www.vaapvt.org Copyright © 2023, Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.