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Welcome New ILCM Staff! Spring 2018
Posted on Mar 19 2018
Four new full-time staff members and 12 interns started work at ILCM in January and February, marking expanded capacity to meet the growing need for immigration assistance in Minnesota.
Yer Vang grew up in Minneapolis, after her family arrived from a refugee camp in Thailand. She graduated in 2015 from Minneapolis Business College with a legal office administration degree. “I learned how to do both office and legal work at the same time,” she explains. She worked for a law firm in Minneapolis before she started working at ILCM as a legal assistant in January. Her experience also comes from closer to home, as she helped family members through the process of filing immigration petitions. Now she works on naturalization cases as well as adjustment of status and family petitions.
Yer said she wanted to work at ILCM “so I could help more people.” Now a U.S. citizen, Yer said:
“I am able to use the natural skills I have to help people and make sure they are safe and not have them worry about the risk when they are here. Supposedly this is a safe country – that is the reason why they came here. I want to assure them that we do want them here.”
Sylvie chose to move to Minnesota because, she said, it is “a good place to live permanently.” At ILCM, she will work as a policy advocate.
Mirella Ceja-Orozco started at ILCM when she was in her first year of law school at Hamline, continued as a pro bono lawyer in private practice, and has now returned as a staff attorney. Her commitment to immigration law is personal: “My father was deported when I was very young,” she explains, “and I have a very mixed-status family. As one of the people with legal status, it was my obligation as a child to be the interpreter, sometimes to be the person to drop off an overnight bag for a person who was being deported.”
Mirella moved to Minnesota for law school, arriving for her August orientation “with a puff coat and snow boots on—that’s how California-sheltered I was!” Now, she says, she is “a super big Minnesota advocate,” and happy to be here and with ILCM.
Joyce Bennet Alvarado moved to Worthington in February to become the second staff attorney in the ILCM office there. After growing up in Honduras, she came to Minnesota to attend the University of St. Thomas Law School, graduating in 2017. Joyce says she liked St. Thomas’s emphasis on being a lawyer as a vocation, not just a profession.
Working in Worthington is her first experience of living and working in a rural area. “I really like it because the community is so involved,” Joyce says. “There are so many groups here that are helping immigrants. We work with churches, with the crisis center, with different agencies, so that’s pretty exciting.”
Along with these new staff members, ILCM welcomes 12 new interns in spring semester. Among them:
Mon Non was two months old when he arrived in the United States with his family as refugees from Burma. Mon is now in his first year of college at the University of Minnesota, after graduating from St. Paul Central High School. He’s also a professional photographer, and the photos in this article are part of his internship contribution to ILCM.
Andrea Duarte-Alonso is one of two interns from St. Catherine University who are assisting with Detainee Legal Assistance calls. She comes from a Mexican immigrant family in Worthington, where she first encountered ILCM and John Keller. Now a junior at St. Kate’s, she has an ambitious focus on political science, communications, journalism, and women’s studies, and is interested in pursuing a career in immigration law.