Immigration Law Clinic

Host: All right — welcome back to another episode of Applying Yourself, the WashU Law admissions office podcast. I am super excited about today’s episode. We have Katie Herbert Meyer, who’s an associate professor of practice here at the law school and director of the Immigration Law Clinic, joining us today. Professor Meyer, welcome.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Thank you.

Host: Thanks so much for being here. Can you help us kick off today by sharing how long you’ve been at WashU Law?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Absolutely. I was kind of joking before we started, saying it feels like I’ve been here my entire professional life. I actually graduated from WashU Law in 2003. I then practiced in the nonprofit sector doing immigration law for about 15 years, but during that time, I continued to be connected with WashU’s law school.

I served as a formal site supervisor for clinic students doing a clinic under Professor Karen Tokarz. I was an adjunct professor of law in 2012 and 2013. And then currently, I serve, as you just said, as the director of the Immigration Law Clinic, and I started that position in July 2018.

Host: Are you a St. Louis native?

Katie Herbert Meyer: I’m not.

Host: Okay.

Katie Herbert Meyer: No — I came to St. Louis for undergrad, stayed for law school, and haven’t left.

Host: And then WashU got you.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yep.

Host: Got you to stay. So, okay. As you mentioned, the Immigration Law Clinic started in July of 2018, so you started from the inception of the clinic. Can you tell us a little bit about why WashU decided to create the Immigration Clinic?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah, it’s a pretty simple answer, believe it or not: student demand. So, kind of an example of students advocating for what they need. It led to the creation of the clinic. It took time, understandably, but students really pushed for it and were able to convince the administration of the importance. The law school then conducted a nationwide search, and I was fortunate enough to be selected.

Host: And so the objective of the clinic is to help students learn from their lawyering experience while assisting low- and moderate-income persons. Can you talk through some of the day-to-day tasks students do, and generally about the clinic and the work that’s done there?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Certainly. Students essentially act as the main lawyer for their clients in the semester they’re in the clinic. They are responsible for all lawyering tasks. Everything a lawyer would do on a case, they are responsible for it. Now, they do it under my close supervision — I am supervising everything they’re doing — but they are responsible for communicating with the client, with opposing counsel, with witnesses.

They are responsible for scheduling all meetings, for planning and actually conducting those meetings. They prepare filings that go to courts and to agencies. They work with clients to gather evidence and prepare exhibit packets. They do trial preparation. They prepare clients for witness testimony. And then when we have trials, students actually present those trials in court.

Host: One question we get from students is — do they come in… So, let’s say the fall clinic started a matter, and then does the spring clinic come in, or…?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Exactly.

Host: Okay.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yes. Immigration law especially is known for taking a very long time, right? So it is very rare for a case to wrap up in one semester, or even one academic year. Each semester we will select a couple of new cases, but most of the cases on the clinic’s docket will be carryovers from previous semesters.

So another task that students are responsible for is — before the end of their semester, they write a detailed transfer memo to future students to help with some continuity of representation, so the next team can do their best to pick up where the prior team left off.

Host: And really, they’re going from zero to 100. I mean, these are people who have just been reading textbooks about the law. Do you notice a confidence curve as the semester goes on?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yes — yes, exactly. I love that you just said “confidence curve.” So I talk with students at the beginning of every semester about what I call a competence-confidence cycle. It’s a little bit of a chicken-before-the-egg, right? You can’t have competence in anything you do in life until you have enough confidence to try it, and you can’t really have confidence that you’re good at something until you get a certain level of competence, right?

There’s no better way to learn than to jump in, and a clinic is an ideal setting because — I like to say — it gives you a safety net, right? Everything they’re doing is under my close supervision, my guidance. I’m helping guide them and shape them into lawyers in an environment where their mistakes will be caught. Everything is reviewed. Even emails don’t go out of the clinic until I’ve reviewed them.

So they get to do that before they’re thrown into practice, where maybe no one is checking their work when they’re lawyers.

Host: Wow. And that’s good, because I know a lot of WashU Law students — what is the percentage, like 80 to 90% of students do at least one clinic?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah. It’s close to 90% of our students who take at least one clinic. It’s very popular, and I think very important.

Host: For sure. And really, it would help students when they get out into practice. They’re like, “Okay, I’ve done this before. The confidence is there.” And this might be — I was going to ask, what organizations do you all work with? And my other question was, how do people find you to say, “I have a case”?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Okay. Yep — and I think you were right to link those two. So I’ll start with the first question. I came from the nonprofit world. I worked in immigration law locally in the nonprofit sector, so I was very well connected already with the St. Louis immigrant community service providers. I’ve continued those connections here in the clinic.

The clinic is formally a member of the ISPN, the Immigrant Service Providers Network of St. Louis, where various service providers — not just lawyers, but service providers from housing to food access to education support — all come together once a month and really kind of talk about the needs we’re seeing and how we can work collaboratively to address those.

I work very closely with other local nonprofit legal service providers, like the MICA Project, which was actually founded by two WashU alums in 2012. I work with St. Francis Community Services, which is part of Catholic Charities. We work with IFCLA — the Interfaith Committee on Latin America — an organization called Bilingual International, and the International Institute.

So we really do try to all be in touch and connected. The main goal is that we aren’t duplicating services, right? There really is still a higher need for services than there are free service providers. So we really try to stay in touch to make sure that the maximum number of people are being provided services, spread out by our agencies.

Due to that, the majority of our clients have come to us directly as referrals from other service providers who are unable to work with particular clients — whether because they don’t qualify, or just because of capacity. Increasingly, we do have some who find out about us from the law school’s website.

Host: Maybe this podcast.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Exactly — from this podcast, right? Word of mouth is starting to spread, but we do work really closely with those partners.

Host: Can you share some examples of particular projects that students in the clinic have worked on in recent years?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Sure, sure. Our clinic handles a variety of cases, including asylum, family-based immigration (which is largely about reunifying or keeping together families), and other humanitarian-type immigration cases. And really, the fun, happy cases — we get to work with clients to finally become citizens, if that’s what they want to do, on naturalization cases.

Like I said, we represent a lot of asylum seekers. We really have clients from all over the world. So I’ll give just a handful of recent case examples. We represent an Afghan mother with two young girls who came to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul, and we’re working with her on seeking asylum — hope, fingers crossed, to get an answer here very soon.

We have worked with several families from Turkey fleeing political persecution. Last summer, we started working with a transgender female client from Mexico fleeing both interpersonal and state violence. We’ve worked with many families. One that comes to mind is a family of six from Honduras fleeing gang violence.

So we work with a variety of clients from all over the world, and most of my students end up finding it’s just a really incredible way to learn about what’s going on in the world through the eyes of our clients.

Host: The clinical education program newsletter highlighted the experience of 3L Margaret Mann and her client Zara — whose name has been changed for confidentiality. Margaret shared that the clinic instills a compassionate approach within students. Can you talk about cultivating that culture, and your role in that?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. I really intentionally designed into the clinic classroom component teaching what’s called client-centered lawyering, and then trauma-informed lawyering practices.

By client-centered lawyering, we mean a model of lawyering where the client is seen as a vital, integral partner — on a level playing field with the attorneys. The client is the expert on their life and their goals. We are the experts on the law. Together, we come together and design the right path for the client.

We also teach trauma-informed lawyering skills, which really emphasizes lawyering from empathy and with empathy for our clients. And Dr. Brené Brown defines empathy as feeling with someone. In the context of law, I really think that means we are walking with our client — hand in hand with our client — through the process, and really letting them know, “We are on your side throughout this.”

We reinforce throughout that we are not the government. We do not work for the government. We are on their side, and we are here to make all the arguments that support their case. So that’s something that just gets woven throughout the clinic. We talk about ways to get the information we need from our client to make a strong case in the least traumatic way for our client.

Host: And by the time the client gets to the student, it has been kind of vetted that there is a case, right? Do you ever feel like it’s hard for students? I know it was hard for me when I started practicing — sometimes a client has a very compelling story, but there’s just no legal remedy. Do your students encounter that?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah, yeah. So you’re right — I do vet every case. There’s an intake process where I review to see if this is an appropriate case for the clinic, if there is a case there, as you say. But even within that, often there is a case — and under what I believe is an academically and legal-practice-accurate interpretation of the law, sometimes a strong case — but the reality is that the adjudicators of the courts that we’re appearing in front of may have a high likelihood of still denying the case.

So it does offer the students an opportunity to learn the challenges of being a lawyer. In this case, it’s specific to immigration law, but sometimes, as a lawyer — we do everything right. We advocate so zealously for our client. We are citing all the right case law. We are making all the right factual arguments. And in the end, we still don’t win that case for our client.

There are lots of opportunities in the clinic for students to get to experience that — again, before they’re out in the real world and have to do that untethered.

Host: And the great thing — or the interesting thing — about law is that it’s so dynamic. It changes from year to year, sometimes day to day. For immigration law especially — I mean, you’ve been doing this since 2003 — have you seen how the national landscape has affected your practice in the clinic?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No doubt, the immigration legal landscape has changed and evolved over the years. Overall, in practice, it has become much more difficult to win asylum cases, even though the law has not changed. So in theory, it should not be any more difficult than it used to be, but in practice, it has become much more difficult.

We talk in the clinic seminar class about what these hurdles are, and what are best practices for us to try to prove the additional elements that judges seem to want and need to hear, even though those elements aren’t written in the law.

So I think a clinic’s a good opportunity to actually talk about those things and how it changes the way we practice law. I also have a class on lawyering philosophy that talks about the importance of lawyers — all lawyers, not just law students or new lawyers — to identify their own philosophy of lawyering and what’s going to guide them in making decisions.

In that class, we actually read an article. It was in Dissent Magazine, and it’s called Why I Left Immigration Law. We talk out loud about why it’s difficult, and why some people have made the choice to not continue doing it — and then I talk about why I have continued to keep doing it, despite the obstacles.

So I try to not just keep that beneath the surface, but actually bring it to the surface and have a discussion, so that students can think about that now. My goal is that anyone who chooses to enter the field of immigration law does it knowingly, and that they will have longevity. They will be able to do it for the long run and not burn out.

Host: Yes, yes, yes. And then finally — obviously you run the clinic, but talk about any other classes that you teach at WashU.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah. In addition to directing the clinic, I also teach Immigration Law and Policy. I should say, I have taught that for the last five years. It is admittedly a challenging course.

Host: Sure.

Katie Herbert Meyer: But it attempts to cover the whole wide array of immigration law — from the various ways someone can get a visa, family immigration, employment-based immigration, asylum, refugee law, things that can make someone deportable, defenses to deportation, citizenship. We try to…

Host: The whole picture.

Katie Herbert Meyer: The whole picture, in one semester. So I’ve taught that for the last five years. Actually, starting next year, I will be shifting and teaching a new course, which will be U.S. Refugee and Asylum Law. We have a professor who started this year who is going to be teaching immigration law, so now we will be able to offer additional courses within that field. So, stay tuned and look forward to taking refugee and asylum law.

Host: Did you go into law school with an interest in immigration, or how did this come to be your area?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah — really good question. So I’m from the Midwest. I’m from Omaha, and really was not exposed to much, or any, immigration growing up, but I sort of always was just one of those — I don’t know — was always trying to fight the fight. So I went to law school just knowing I wanted to do something in public interest.

I actually thought I might become a public defender. I thought, “Our system of justice is founded on everyone having representation, and that’s how I will fight for justice.” It was here at WashU Law where I discovered immigration law.

I took criminal law from Professor Legomsky, who is a renowned emeritus professor here who taught immigration law — but before that, taught me criminal law. He included at the end of that criminal law class a section on international criminal law, and it just started piquing my interest.

Then my first summer internship was at the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, and my supervisor just kind of randomly said, “Hey, there’s this immigrant service providers meeting. I can’t go. Do you want to go?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll go.” It was just there where, all of a sudden, the light bulb went off, and I thought, “Wow, I keep saying I want to give voice to the voiceless and work with people who aren’t being listened to. Who is more voiceless in our democracy than immigrants who can’t vote? They literally don’t have a voice in our democracy.”

I just started thinking, “I wonder what that would be like.” So my second internship, I actually was able to get an internship in the D.C. area doing immigration law. And I did that, and it cemented it, and I said, “This is what I’m going to do.”

Host: What about the students who take your clinic — do you find that they’re coming in with an interest, or are some of them just trying it out, like, they think they might like it? Is it kind of a range?

Katie Herbert Meyer: That’s a great question, and I will say it’s some of both. I do have some students every semester — usually not the majority, but at least one or two or a few each semester — who really are very interested in immigration, and either want to do that as their full-time job post-graduation, or maybe they know they’re going into big law for at least a period of time and they want to learn to do immigration and asylum cases so they can do that pro bono at their firm.

So I have those who come in with that interest, and I have others who I’ve just convinced, right, that they’re going to learn good skills. And I think they do — those who come in knowing it’s a clinic where you get a lot of client interaction, you get to learn how to interview clients and how to do that in a client-centered and trauma-informed way. Those are skills that will be important no matter what area of law they practice in.

Host: Yeah. What types of roles — maybe post-grad or during the summer — have students gone on to pursue after working in the Immigration Law Clinic?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yeah. I have taught the most amazing students, so I can’t possibly tell you what everyone has done. But it really is the full range. I have students who go into public interest, whether they do immigration or something else. I have so many students who graduate and go to big law. Many students who go on to do clerkships, at least for a couple of years. And students who go into the government. So really, students are able to take those skills and go in any direction they want with them.

I’ll highlight a few students, if that’s okay.

Host: Sure.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Hopefully I don’t embarrass them. But, for example, Ryan Schultheis, who graduated in 2021 —

Host: Amazing! Hi Ryan, if you’re listening.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Amazing student. He graduated from WashU Law, went on and did a two-year federal clerkship, finished that, and was — I mean, this is quite rare for someone two years out of law school — was able to secure a job at USCIS, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the main immigration agency, in their refugee and asylum division, which is what he came to law school to do. I am so happy for him.

Similarly, a student, Grace Day, who graduated in, I believe, 2022 — post-graduation, she’s doing a two-year immigration-specific fellowship. There’s something called the Immigration Justice Corps, and she’s working at an organization in New York called The Door that works with at-risk youth. She’s specifically working on immigration matters for them.

Host: And I wonder if she interned there during the summer.

Katie Herbert Meyer: She did. She did.

Host: Okay.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Yes. So she had done the summer internship, loved it. I think they loved her, and they said, “How do we keep you?” Many nonprofits don’t just have funding to hire everyone that they think is great. So they looked into funding, and they were able to get this Immigration Justice Corps fellowship. This is a newer fellowship, and I will say, initially, most of the fellowship opportunities were in New York or on the East Coast. They are adding them here, and we now have at least one locally, so there really are opportunities to go on and do that.

For time’s sake, I’ll highlight one other student — Nathan Hall, and I think he was also 2021.

Host: Okay, that sounds right, yeah.

Katie Herbert Meyer: So he also did a two-year federal clerkship, and now is actually practicing business immigration law at a pretty big law firm in Louisville, Kentucky.

Host: Oh my gosh, so people really go everywhere.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Everywhere, yeah. And again, I have students who don’t end up in immigration law, and they’re doing great, amazing things, but I thought I’d highlight a few who did use those skills to go into immigration law.

Host: Sure, sure. That’s awesome. So, why should students consider being part of the Immigration Law Clinic — and really, you know… The clinic office, I want to go down there as a staff member, because students are always coming and going, and there’s a buzz about it. Why should students do a clinic, even if not immigration?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Sure — it’s a great question, and I’d love to answer it. Law school teaches students so many wonderful skills. It teaches them how to find the law, how to analyze the law, how to think like a lawyer. But classroom classes can’t tell you how to actually be a lawyer day-to-day. That’s what a clinic does.

Clinics give students these essential lawyering skills that they can then take into any area of the law. They learn: How do you manage the day-to-day demands of being a lawyer? I intentionally assign students multiple cases with different deadlines, and they get a chance to learn — like, “I’ve got this email from this client, a text from this client, but I’ve got this deadline for the court. How do I manage competing deadlines?”

And even — what does a motion look like? How do I draft a motion? What is a professional email? Just those sorts of skills that really only come from doing. The goal really is that students can go into their post-graduation job — their first job — with that level of confidence that they have learned those basic lawyering skills.

Host: Yeah. And like you said, it’s just a unique opportunity, while you’re still a law student, to be part of essentially a law firm that operates out of the law school. Only those students who are in the clinic in a certain semester have access to the clinic suite, because we operate as a law firm and we run conflicts checks. For every student who is in the clinic, we have to do conflicts checks to make sure they don’t have conflicts with any matters.

That’s why it sort of feels like a secret club, but there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason that there’s card access only for those students who have cleared conflicts checks for that semester.

Well, finally, I want to end on this note. St. Louis, as we who live here know, is a great, great place to build a life — or certainly to attend law school. Can you share your favorite place to go in St. Louis, or what you like most about the city?

Katie Herbert Meyer: Sure. I think this has been the hardest question. You gave me a heads-up you would be asking, because it’s hard to think of just one. So I’m going to take a cop-out a little bit and say I’m going to give you two.

Host: Sure.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Two. So I love Grant’s Farm. My family and I live near Grant’s Farm, but it’s, I think, kind of a hidden gem in St. Louis. It’s almost a mini zoo. It has a history element that I really like — you get to learn the history of a region of St. Louis. It’s a great place for families, for individuals. And it has a beer garden. You can get a free beer every time you go.

Host: I think you get two. They give you two tickets that you can give one to a friend.

Katie Herbert Meyer: Exactly, exactly. So I love Grant’s Farm. Depending on the day, it’s probably about a 15- to 20-minute drive from WashU, but I think it’s worth the trek.

And then, increasingly, my family and I love going down to City Foundry.

Host: Yes.

Katie Herbert Meyer: City Foundry is sort of this glorified food court with a bar in the center, and it just has all these amazing little restaurants that have set up in the food court — all local restaurants, really fresh food, foods from all over the world. It’s just a great place that we’ve been taking our kids to. It’s a way to kind of get out of the house and go do something fun.

Host: Wonderful. Well, I could keep going, but we’ll stop here, and maybe have you back for a second episode. Thank you so much for being here.

Katie Herbert Meyer: You’re welcome, you’re welcome. I’m happy to be here.