![]() ![]() But each person helped in this way represents the investment of many, many hours from lawyers and law students if you were analyzing their effectiveness, they’d probably score poorly relative to AMF (especially if you included the value of in kind donations of time from skilled individuals). Big Beard’s stall in the market and give him some money. It’s very ground-level work that makes an enormous difference in the lives of individual immigrants. It’s tracking down proof that someone is from the country they say they are, when 95% of record-keeping institutions in the country have been blown up and the procedure for getting a passport is to find Mr. Their staff manages a team of volunteer law students and lawyers who pour hours into interviewing clients, investigating cases, collecting documents to prove refugee status, and writing appeals. This aspect of their work isn’t glamorous. It’s not arguing before the Supreme Court to establish rights people didn’t have a week before. The majority of IRAP’s day to day work involves processing appeals for individual refugees whose requests to resettle in the U.S. Last year IRAP received a grant from the Open Philanthropy Project to increase the extent of their policy work. A notable win here was using FOIA to force the DHS to release their refugee decision manual. As her organization grew in scope, it effected some at-the-margins policy work as well. But rejected applicants can effectively appeal by asking that DHS “reconsider” their application. Using case law from asylum decisions, Becca filed requests to reconsider on behalf of these Iraqi refugees. Back home, she began recruiting other Yale law students, then students at other law schools. While in Jordan on an internship, Heller talked to Iraqi refugees there whose applications to emigrate to the US had been denied they had given up because there was no way to appeal Homeland Security decisions. One partner was the International Refugee Assistance Project, founded by Becca Heller. That speed mattered – not just to residents being badgered into giving up their green cards, but because it demonstrated to Trump and America that the consequences of violating the Constitution are severe and immediate. Once the crisis hit, it became easy to see how everything that went into preparing for it was high leverage – which was why people donated $20,000,000 over the weekend.īut the ACLU didn’t act alone. If you just evaluated the effectiveness of their Friday morning work, you’d miss that they were also holding the capacity to respond to Trump’s order as quickly as they did. ![]() Whatever the staff of the ACLU was doing on Friday morning, it wasn’t as important as what they did Friday afternoon, after Trump banned legal immigrants from reentering the country, even if they were in flight. But this is false economy during a crisis the extra reserve may be the difference between disruption and disaster. How do you judge the effectiveness of preparing for something that might never happen? Consider emergency room capacity if you have enough space and staff to deal with a diphtheria epidemic, it will seem wasted during the 99% of the time there isn’t one. ![]()
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