“I laugh really hard and I cry really hard with my clients,” says Anna Gallagher as she reflects on her career as an immigration attorney for over three decades. “I don’t think I have ever had a client that I did not have a good laugh with … you always have to look for the light – it’s there – and the resilience of folks is pretty amazing.”
Gallagher is currently executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), which supports immigration services, including legal representation, for more than 470 nonprofits across the country.
One aspect of their mission is to “promote the dignity of immigrants by ensuring access to affordable legal services.” And, as the daughter of immigrants, Gallagher has made the pursuit of immigration and refugee law not just her career – but her passion.
“My parents are immigrants from Donegal [Ireland] who taught me that all of us have dignity. In Philadelphia, the world I lived in as a child was made up of people that were not formally educated and had come from places where there was no electricity or running water – but they were dignified … I feel really fortunate because sometimes it takes living something to understand it. I think I said this to my mother last year, ‘You know, I went into immigration law because of you.’”
Gallagher earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and Latin American studies from Temple University in 1984. In 1987, she received her doctorate in law from the Antioch University School of Law, which is now part of the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. “I purposefully chose that school because it reflected my values and how I grew up. It was the first law school in the country that created legal clinics to represent vulnerable and low-income people.”
In 1986, Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, also known as the Reagan Amnesty). While this act introduced penalties to employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers, it also offered lawful permanent residence (LPR), a “green card,” to undocumented migrants. Around three million people gained legal status and protection from deportation through IRCA. “I cut my teeth on amnesty as soon as I got out of law school – that’s when amnesty was being implemented,” Gallagher said. She went to work for a small law firm in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where she guided working immigrants through the process of becoming lawful permanent residents. “In the 80s, people weren’t terrified that they were going to get reported, there were no raids,” she said, “The labor certification process was easier, it didn’t take forever to get a green card if you were a dishwasher or a laborer. So, I did lots of labor certifications. It was such a joy!”
“So today there are not enough immigration judges,” Gallagher continued. “They [Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR)] currently ramped up from 200 judges to 700, but there is still a backlog of more than two million cases in the immigration system. I have one young woman who is still one of my last pro bono clients. She has been with me – this is crazy – I think it has been 13 years and she still does not have a green card.”
The EOIR is part of the U.S. Department of Justice and oversees the immigration court system. Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) send cases to the immigration courts by submitting a Notice to Appear document to the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) within DHS. Unlike the federal or state court system, where a prosecutor makes the final decision on whether or not a case moves forward to the court, once an ICE or CBP enforcement agent sends a hearing document, deportation proceedings begin immediately. And although OPLA attorneys can exercise prosecutorial discretion to keep non-priority cases from entering the immigration court system, that rarely happens. Once the immigration court receives a hearing notice, the case must proceed through the system, regardless of its merits. The immigration courts, which are funded at about half the level of the DHS agencies, struggle to stem the tide of this huge backlog, with few of the legal resources that are staffed at DHS.
“One of the things that is very important to me and to many of us advocates, is that the system has to function,” says Gallagher. “For example, immigration courts are not like the federal courts, they are administrative courts and not sufficiently resourced. Their case loads are huge. We need to get the message out to the public that we have good immigration judges … These judges need to be given respect … sufficiently funded for such legal support as more judicial clerks, legal assistants, interpreters and administrative employees to make the system work.”
Gallagher met her husband, Juan Luis Guillen, in Guatemala City in 1992. A civil war was ongoing in Guatemala at the time and Guillen, a journalist, was covering the war. Gallagher had moved to Guatemala City to become the deputy director for the Center for Human Rights Legal Action that year. After the couple resettled in the U.S., Guillen began playing golf, eventually transforming this enthusiasm into his current career as a golf journalist. He now covers international golf with a focus on Latino players. Most recently, he has been covering the British Open. Laughing, Gallagher confesses that “I was so uninterested in golf for years. Then covid happens, and my husband says ‘vamos – let’s go play golf!’ So, we are members at the University of Maryland Golf Course. I have been playing now for three years and I absolutely love it.”
The couple moved from Silver Spring to Greenbelt in 2016. “Finding Greenbelt was like a divine intervention – I was looking for a place that was affordable, number one, and that had a great sense of community. I loved the idea of Greenbelt, of GHI (Greenbelt Homes Inc.). I always admired Eleanor Roosevelt; she was a heroine of mine. And then we discovered the Catholic Community of Greenbelt.” Gallagher is now a member of the Intentional Eucharistic Community, which provided funding in 2020 for Gallagher to travel to the Port Isabel Detention Center, outside of Brownsville, Texas. She was able to win humanitarian protection for a woman who had fled across the border there to escape death threats from her partner and to reunite with her young daughter.
“Greenbelt reminded me of growing up in Philly because you can walk to things: the supermarket, the library, the theater,” says Gallagher. “I love that there are affordable apartments and I like living simply. I grew up in a rowhouse and until I was 5 or 6, there were always aunts and uncles coming from Ireland. Our living room was the front steps and the street and that’s what Greenbelt reminds me of. It reminds me of the working-class neighborhood where I grew up in Philly, it reminds me of Adams Morgan back in the day when my husband and I lived there with our kids. It’s one of the three best places I have ever lived. It’s home.”