Pro Bono Work at the Border

Episode Notes

Transcript

State Bar of Texas Podcast

Pro Bono Work at the Border

09/06/2018

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Intro: Welcome to the State Bar of Texas Podcast, your monthly source for conversations and curated content to improve your law practice, with your host Rocky Dhir.

[Music]

Rocky Dhir: Hi, this is Rocky Dhir, with the State Bar of Texas Podcast. I was thinking the other day about pro bono work, many of us want to do it, some of us have the time and make the time to do it and then there are others that dedicate their lives to it. They make an entire life out of pro bono work.

Today, we’re going to meet one of the people in those latter categories. We’re going to meet Kimi Jackson. She’s with the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, also known as ProBAR. I’ve got Kimi here with me and she’s going in talk to us about ProBAR and she’s also going to talk to us about her life in the world of pro bono law.

This is going in be a lot of fun. Kimi, thank you for being here with us.

Kimi Jackson: Thank you so much.

Rocky Dhir: First of all, tell us how did you get into the pro bono field? I mean presumably you could have gone to a big firm, you could have gone in practice law in your own office, you decided to dedicate your life to pro bono work. How did that happen? Tell us your story.

Kimi Jackson: Well the reason I went to law school actually was because I wanted to contribute something to the world and I felt that studying law would give me a tool that would allow me to make a greater contribution to the world. So that’s actually the whole reason that I went to law school in the first place.

My dad always told me that you spend your life working so you should find a career that you enjoy because you’re going to be doing it day in and day out. So you’ve got to do something that you enjoy and that you feel good about, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to do that throughout my life.

I feel very fortunate to be able to do the work that I do and to know that I and my office make a difference for the people that we serve and I take great pleasure in that.

Rocky Dhir: So let’s talk for a moment about who you serve at ProBAR. What is ProBAR and who is it aimed at?

Kimi Jackson: ProBAR is a non-profit legal office and we provide legal services to detained immigrants at the border and that includes detained adults and also detained unaccompanied minors. We serve a number of shelters for detained accompanied minors, and we also serve adults detained at the Port Isabel Detention Center and also the East Hidalgo Detention Center.

All of these centers are located in South Texas in Cameron, Hidalgo and Willacy counties.

Rocky Dhir: And you’re actually – you physically are located in Harlingen.

Kimi Jackson: That’s right.

Rocky Dhir: So you’re close to the action down there. Let’s talk for a moment, first of all about how ProBAR is set up. So it’s actually a project of the American Bar Association, right?

Kimi Jackson: That’s right. We’re a project of the American Bar Association and they take care of our administrative needs. They supervise our work and we’re one of three projects of the American Bar Association in fact.

Rocky Dhir: And then the State Bar of Texas is also supporting along with the Texas Access to Justice Foundation.

Kimi Jackson: That’s right. The State Bar of Texas actually helped us get started in the first place.

Rocky Dhir: Oh wow, okay.

Kimi Jackson: And they continued to provide us with financial support every year. Each year, the State Bar of Texas Leadership Program comes down and visits South Padre Island, and we have an opportunity to speak with their participants and earlier this year, State Bar of Texas President Joe Longley visited our office and we were able to share some ideas about addressing the current border crisis.

Rocky Dhir: Okay, so Kimi, you’ve mentioned the ABA and you’ve mentioned the State Bar of Texas, but ProBAR is also getting support from the Texas Access to Justice Foundation. So what role is the Access to Justice Foundation playing? Can you kind of tell us a little bit about that?

Kimi Jackson: Yes, the Texas Access to Justice Foundation has been wonderful during this crisis. Well, they have been funding our office for a long time but particularly during this crisis, they’ve worked very hard to rally the additional funding and support that we’ve needed in order to ramp up our services to address the increased need that we’re facing. We really appreciate their support.

Rocky Dhir: Now let’s kind of maybe talk about what I think might be the elephant in the room, this issue about what’s going on at the borders, it’s gotten a lot of coverage in the media. It can tend to elicit some political responses. So obviously if the American Bar is involved in it, the State Bar is involved in this project, it begs the question, are the American Bar and the State Bar kind of making political messages with their support or is there something apolitical about ProBAR.

Can you maybe address that for us because I certainly would like to know the answer to that and I imagine you probably know it better than anybody?

Kimi Jackson: Sure, ProBAR is not a political organization. We’re a direct services organization. So our role is to provide direct legal services to detained individuals and the primary service that we provide — that we provide to the largest numbers of people is general, know your rights presentations or general orientations, we call them in the adult context.

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We provide these orientations to the detained adults and also to the detained children, so that they understand the legal process that they’re in, because most immigrants are pro se before the immigration judge. And so we provide them with background that they need in order to determine whether they have legal rights within the United States and to pursue those rights.

Rocky Dhir: Okay, so it’s really about informing them as to what their rights are and helping them navigate through that series of rights or obligations that they might have, is that a fair summary of it, maybe?

Kimi Jackson: That is the broadest service that we provide. And then we also provide individual orientations or screenings. We provide referrals and in some cases, we provide direct representation or we coordinate representation by a pro bono attorney.

So there’s a broad array of services that we provide but they’re all designed toward serving the individual. They’re not any sort of political advocacy.

Rocky Dhir: So now given that, can you give us some specific examples of what ProBAR is doing to assist people at the border? Can you maybe add a little bit of color to what we’ve been talking about? What are some examples of maybe cases you’ve seen or needs that ProBAR is trying to meet? Give us a little bit more information about that.

Kimi Jackson: Sure. Many people started hearing about unaccompanied minors who were detained in South Texas and in other parts of the country in 2014, when that issue was seen a lot in the news. But ProBAR has been serving that population for a long time before 2014 and since then. And unaccompanied minors that we serve, they come primarily from Central American countries and they have experienced very, very high levels of trauma.

And so it’s our role to provide them with a general orientation and then to screen them in order to find out which types of legal relief they might be eligible for. And some of them are eligible for asylum, others for special immigrant juvenile status or T visas or U visas or other forms of relief.

And so, we screen them, our staff meets with each child and they range in age from five up until just before 18. There are also children younger than five but screening them is of course more challenging. So we meet with each of those children and give them an individual screening and determine what kinds of legal relief they might be eligible for.

And then based on the posture of their situation, whether they might be released to a sponsor soon or [Inaudible] detention longer, we make decisions about what kind of services we are able to provide for them, because all of these children are in the immigration court process. They’re all in removal proceedings or deportation proceedings and so they’re in great need of help to navigate that situation.

Rocky Dhir: So if I heard you correctly, you said there are children as young as five or even younger than five that are unaccompanied and showing up at the border, is that — did I hear that correctly?

Kimi Jackson: That’s right.

Rocky Dhir: Wow.

Kimi Jackson: Now, recently the family separation crisis has been in the news.

Rocky Dhir: Right.

Kimi Jackson: And those children are sort of in a different situation because they arrived with their parents but were separated. But traditionally, ProBAR serves a population of unaccompanied minors, who yes, arrived at the border without their parent.

Rocky Dhir: Now, how do these kids even know where to go? I mean I’m trying to think of say a four or five year old, who’s just making their way towards a border, how do they even know where they’re going or what they’re doing? Do they just stumble across the border accidentally or do they actually have an awareness as to where they’re going?

Kimi Jackson: You’re right. They’re very young children probably do not and somebody — they’re probably traveling with someone and maybe it’s a relative other than a parent or a friend of the family or another person. So they’re really young children, are generally not traveling alone but the children who are a little bit older yes, in some cases do travel — frequently travel with other people, family members, other adults, other immigrants or sometimes, they actually do travel alone and ride on top of the trains and make their way here alone, which is very dangerous.

But it certainly happens and you have to think about why is this happening, it’s because Honduras and El Salvador are some of the most dangerous countries in the world, right now. So when we interviewed the kids and we talked about their situations why they fled their home country, then we can understand why they made the choice to take this dangerous journey and go to an unknown place, because they’re going to an unknown place in order to flee from a very known danger that they’re facing.

Rocky Dhir: Now that might beg the question though, why are they coming here? I mean if they’re in Honduras, they could go to Mexico, they could go to South America, they’re choosing the United States. Do you have any kind of insight into why they’re choosing here versus any other neighboring country that might be closer by?

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Kimi Jackson: Actually I recently had an opportunity to participate in a migration learning tour. From working here at the border, I sometimes felt like oh everybody’s coming here. But when I went to Guatemala and to Chiapas, Mexico and I learned that there are many, many migrants in Chiapas, Mexico who stay there or they stay in Mexico City.

Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are in such rough situations now that people are fleeing to wherever they can get to. So we see the ones who come here but they’re also fleeing to other countries within Central America and into Mexico.

Rocky Dhir: So it’s not just a singular beeline towards US border, they’re actually going in both directions and stopping along the way and just figuring out where they want to be. Is that kind of what’s going on?

Kimi Jackson: That’s right. And what I heard when I visited Tapachula in Chiapas, which is near the border there and it’s a place that most migrants pass through on their way north, what I learned from the professionals there who work with the migrant population is that the people there, they are forced to get away from whatever it was happening to them in their country.

And so they will go wherever they can to be safe from that. And whether they can find an opportunity in Mexico or whether they come here, it’s all of the above. But what they’re trying to do is get away from a real danger. And let me give you an example, let’s say that you’re the mother or the father of a 12 year old girl in Honduras and a gang member has decided that your daughter is attractive and so he wants to date her.

If she decides to date him, of course, she’s going to be involved with gangs and that’s going to lead to all sorts of trouble for her and for your family. But if she says no, then she is very likely to face severe violence and perhaps death at the hands of the gang. So if you’re the parent of that girl, I mean what are you going to do?

You can’t stay there and let this happen to your daughter and maybe you have other children who you need to protect as well. So these are the very real conditions that people are fleeing from and Honduras, El Salvador, these are not large countries. So many of the people who we work with they have already fled from one place in Honduras to another but they find themselves still persecuted because the country itself is small, and whoever is persecuting them has a network and finds out where they are.

So people need to flee farther than that. And I actually think that, that even is a problem in Tapachula and southern Mexico too, that people may flee there, but their persecutor may be able to access them there as well, so people try to get farther away from the persecution that they’re fleeing.

Rocky Dhir: So that’s why some of them come to the United States because they feel like maybe the gangs can’t reach them within the United States, even though they might be able to reach them within parts of Mexico.

Kimi Jackson: That’s probably true.

Rocky Dhir: Wow. Okay so this is interesting because I’ve not read or heard of this side of this story. So we’ve been seeing a lot in the news about family separations and as you noted earlier that’s become the big issue in the news headlines.

First of all, what is ProBAR doing to help people in the family separation scenario and secondly, what is going on at the border that maybe we’re not reading about or hearing about in the mainstream media? Can you kind of add some insight on that?

Kimi Jackson: Sure. So since the family separation crisis started, ProBAR has been collaborating with a number of other nonprofits in Texas and around the country to serve this population.

So first of all, we’re serving the separated children who are in the shelters that we serve. This has been a real challenge. For me as a director, I have to take care of my staff and our staff have been experiencing a higher level of trauma than usual because of working with these kids who are in such severe trauma, having just been separated from their parents.

So we’ve been providing services to the separated kids and then we’ve also been providing services to the separated adults and that’s required the collaboration between multiple organizations to identify who are the separated parents, who are at the detention center.

And then we’ve been very fortunate to receive an outpouring of support from around the country and many, many attorneys do wanted to come and volunteer. So we’ve been coordinating since this crisis began, groups of approximately 10 Spanish-speaking immigration attorneys each week, who come down and work in our office and we provide them with the information that they need in order to go to the detention center and serve the separated parents.

And we’ve been accepting groups of about 10 because there are a limited number of visitation rooms at the detention center. So there are some physical limitations on how many people we can accommodate each week. So these volunteers have been coming down and working very, very hard while they’re here, working long hours and providing services to those separated parents.

And we continue to have these groups each week as long as this crisis continues. We have not yet been able to accommodate all of the volunteers who reached out to us, but that’s a good thing because this situation is ongoing that there’s a need for help.

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And so we’ll be able to continue to facilitate more groups even after the public attention is no longer on this issue, we will be able to invite volunteers who are still willing to come and provide services here at the border.

Rocky Dhir: So you have kind of anticipated one of the questions I was going in ask you, is number one, how do people get involved and number two, you mentioned that you have groups of 10 Spanish-speaking immigration attorneys. So that begs the question, if you want to volunteer do you have to be a Spanish speaker and do you have to be an immigration attorney or is there other ways for people to get involved.

Kimi Jackson: Right now because the situation is so urgent, we are prioritizing the Spanish immigrant attorneys because we need people who could go in and provide these services immediately, but in the longer term, we would really invite attorneys who are willing to come to our office for longer than a week, we love to have a volunteer who can come for three months or six months.

Sometimes, people are between two different job opportunities or something or a retired attorney comes down to our office and volunteers and that’s really valuable because they can take on a case and represent, if they’re here long enough to follow through with the case. And that’s very valuable.

So Spanish-speaking is quite important however we do serve detainees who speak languages other than Spanish, the Port Isabel Detention Center serves detainees from all over the world really there are a lot of people from various African countries and countries in Asia and other countries in South America.

And it’s a constantly changing population, which is impacted by whatever events are occurring around the world. So we often do have opportunities for non-Spanish-speaking attorneys as well; particularly, if they can come for a longer period of time. But right now, during this crisis we have prioritized the Spanish-speaking attorneys with immigration experience.

Rocky Dhir: So can you tell us some of the ways in which the attorneys that come down there? What exactly is kind of the day in the life of a volunteer attorney that’s working with ProBAR?

Kimi Jackson: Sure. They start Monday morning and receive an orientation and some information about what they’ll be doing that week. Then they receive the names and a numbers of detainees who need help. And so, they go out to the detention center and see those people and what services they provide will depend on the needs that week, which are constantly changing but the detained parents have been in the credible fear process. So the volunteer attorneys help them prepare for their credible fear interview and understand the process that they’re in and go forward with that.

Volunteer attorneys can also help people seek bond, some volunteer attorneys have been able to take on a case for representation which is really great because then they can see the case through. Not all volunteers are in a position to be able to do that, so we provide a lot of pro se services when we cannot provide direct representation and our goal is to provide at least some level of service to everybody who needs it.

Rocky Dhir: So now, let’s say I’m a non-Spanish speaker, I’m a non-immigration attorney or in fact I’m a non-attorney. I just, I’m a person that wants to help out, is there a way for me to get involved? Now, it’s not with ProBAR, are there other organizations that I could get involved in if I just want to come and do my part on the border?

Kimi Jackson: Well, there’s a wonderful shelter that’s called La Posada Providencia, and they are not a government shelter. They are a private shelter that provides housing, basic services like a bed and food to asylum seekers who have just been released from detention, and they have a need for a broader array of volunteers including people who can provide English lessons and people who can cook and provide meals and they may have other needs which I’m not aware of. So that would be one place to look.

A person can also make monetary donations which of course are always welcome. We do have a number of staff vacancies in our office as well and we invite applicants. They’re available at the website americanbar.org. You can search for jobs in Texas, in Harlingen, Texas, and see what vacancies are currently — at ProBAR, we have vacancies for paralegals, for staff attorneys and also for management level attorneys.

We’ve been fortunate to be growing due to all of the need that is here right now and so we do have a number of vacancies and we certainly invite applicants. Most of those positions do require Spanish language ability.

Rocky Dhir: I was going to ask that. Okay, you preempted my question.

Kimi Jackson: There’s something else that we can also use, that’s very helpful. Our staff speaks Spanish and we do have people who speak Portuguese and other languages from time to time but the detained adult population comes from many different countries, speaks many different languages and we often need help with interpretations and translations. We are working on developing a database of volunteer translators and interpreters who speak those languages that are not Spanish or English for which we need interpretation and translation from time to time.

(00:20:05)

And sometimes that can be done from somewhere other than South Texas because the interpretation may be able to be done by phone, translations may be able to be completed by emails back and forth, and so that’s another way that people who don’t speak Spanish but do speak another language can help.

Rocky Dhir: Oh that’s interesting. Okay, so they can actually sit in their home cities wherever that is and they can provide those kinds of — those services and that kind of assistance through technology means; email, phone calls, whatever so.

Kimi Jackson: That’s right.

Rocky Dhir: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, now there was something that you talked about earlier that kind of got my wheels turning and it takes a lot to get my wheels turning. My wheels are really gunked-up and they need oil really badly. So compliments to you for getting my wheels turning.

Here’s the question though. So you were talking about how at Port Isabel, there’s people coming in from all over the world, it’s not just south of our border, it’s from all over. Are we seeing family separations taking place even with those families or is it primarily taking place with those that are coming from south of the US border?

Kimi Jackson: I have only seen that in the context of Central American families.

Rocky Dhir: Okay. So then the needs that are demanded or that are needing to be served for the folks that are coming in from other parts of the world may be very different, that’s not so much a family separation issue it may be more of an immigration legal rights issue, I guess? Is that, I’m kind of guessing but I want to kind of get a sense of what the needs are between those two different populations, is there a distinction?

Kimi Jackson: That’s right. I mean they’re all in removal proceedings so they all have an urgent need for removal defense and for people from non-Spanish-speaking countries are usually seeking asylum; although, they could potentially be eligible for other forms of relief, asylum is the most common form that applies.

And people from Central America also are in urgent need of legal representation, legal assistance because they are in deportation proceedings but their situation is complicated and made much more intense by the fact that they are suffering the trauma of having been separated from their children.

So when I went to the Port Isabel Detention Center and met with the detained mothers, they could hardly think about their legal case because they were so concerned with the separation from their children. It’s like trying to prepare for your future education when your house is on fire. You’ve got to take care of the immediate need first, which is to get into safety.

So for these mothers and fathers their immediate need was to be reunified with their children so that they can know that their children are taken care of by them and receiving the parental love that they need and then at that point, they’re in a better position to be able to pursue their legal needs.

But because the parents were detained and in removal proceedings, they were forced to pursue that legal relief even when for many of them it was difficult to focus on that because they were so concerned about the family separation that had just occurred.

Rocky Dhir: For those that are experiencing family separation they really need sort of two phases of help; one is, figuring out what their rights are vis-à-vis family reunification and then, they have to get on to the immigration side, whereas folks that are not experiencing family separation are primarily concerned with the immigration aspect and how they can get their asylum approved. Did I understand that correctly?

Kimi Jackson: Yes.

Rocky Dhir: Okay. For me it’s a world that I’ve not seen yet, so can you kind of describe sort of — I mean what is it like at the border? I mean when you go down there what does it look like, can you describe what the facilities are? I mean I think for a lot of us we just kind of see pictures in the news but we don’t really have a first-hand account of what it looks like. Can you tell us what it looks like at the border?

Kimi Jackson: Sure. Usually, after someone is detained, their first stop is a Customs and Border Patrol facility such as the Ursula Facility, which you may have seen in the news or one of the CBP Processing Centers. And the Ursula Facility has chain-link fence dividing it into sections, it’s kind of a warehouse type building divided into many sections with this chain-link fence and immigrants are supposed to be there for less than 72 hours and it’s a processing center where CBP processes them and determines where they’re going to send them after that.

And from there, the children get sent to Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters and the adults get sent to it an Adult Detention Center like the Port Isabel Detention Center that ProBAR serves. And the Port Isabel Detention Center, it looks and feels like a jail or a prison. It’s a very high security to get in. Recently they’ve — because of the many people who have been visiting, they have heightened the security and you can’t bring in any jewelry, you can’t bring in a watch, clearly you can’t bring a cell phone.

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So you don’t know, once you’re in there, you’re in a cement block room meeting with detainees and you really — there are no windows, so you really can’t tell what time it is, you don’t know how long you’re there. So that’s what the Port Isabel Center looks like.

But answering your question more broadly, you said that immigration removal, defense or immigration detention and asylum seeking people, it’s a world that you haven’t seen before and that’s typical. The average American knows nothing really about immigration and what’s happening and how the laws work and doesn’t realize that most of the people in removal proceedings are unrepresented, and how extremely complex the process is.

So I think that it would probably be helpful for a country as we talk about immigration for the public to have a better understanding of how immigration actually works and how the process functions.

Rocky Dhir: What you’re describing seems like a very intense situation and it sounds like ProBAR is right in the middle of that storm of intensity. Tell us how — how do you and the ProBAR staff, how do you guys sort of keep your humor on a day to day basis? How do you go about without just being a bundle of intense nerves all the time?

I mean just — it sounds like a level of intensity most — certainly most lawyers don’t experience on a daily basis. So do you guys have mechanisms, is it just like any other normal law office or what do you guys do to keep yourselves kind of grounded amidst all this?

Kimi Jackson: That’s a great question. We do screen for ability to handle stress and to manage self-care during our hiring process, because folks who come to work at ProBAR need to know that they are going to be exposed to children and adults who’ve gone through very high levels of trauma and that can have an impact on a staff member.

And so we make sure that staff are aware of that from the time that they interview and that the staff are ready and willing to work in that kind of environment, but once people are in the office, we do everything we can to promote self-care. And recently, during this crisis we pulled out the big guns and we brought puppies to the office.

Rocky Dhir: Oh wow.

Kimi Jackson: We had several volunteers who are willing to bring puppies to our office for our staff to play with and that’s something very therapeutic. We also had a volunteer who brought an adult therapy dog and our staff loved that.

We had professionals who volunteered and came in and gave debriefing session to our staff and gave our staff an opportunity to talk about what they’re experiencing, and how it impacts them. And we’ve talked about self-care and one of our staff members teaches a yoga class in the evenings and invites our staff to participate.

We have a meditation session that occurs that people voluntarily can join in order to just relax and decompress a bit. It’s very important to me in order to preserve the longevity of our staff here to provide as many self-care opportunities as they can and we definitely focus on doing that.

Rocky Dhir: So is there an end to your workday and if so once it’s over, do you just – do you kind of turn things off or are you always thinking about work?

Kimi Jackson: Well I’ve been — I graduated from law school in 2000 and before I worked here, I worked with migrant farm workers in Colorado Legal Services, and that’s also a similar work and that you see people who are in very difficult situations.

And so, I’ve had to learn over the years to do my best to turn off to have hobbies, I love gardening. So I try to get home from work before its dark so that I can spend a little time in my garden in the evening and that’s really important to me.

So generally speaking, I do my best to try to turn off to the extent possible when I go home but certainly during this crisis that just hasn’t been possible and I think that’s had an impact on all of us right now.

But one thing about immigration work is that it’s always changing, so today’s crisis will eventually pass and we’ll probably have another crisis but it will be different and we’ll, we will address it as it comes.

So in general, as much as we can get back to practicing our good self-care, going home to our garden or whatever it is we like to do in the evening, that’s what’s needed in order for us to be able to do this kind of work long term.

Rocky Dhir: Well it sounds you’ve got your hands full. You’ve got some big needs to fill out there. I want to, at least for me personally, I want to thank you for dedicating your life to pro bono work. This is this is pretty incredible I think, it’s very eye-opening that you’re doing this.

So thank you for dedicating yourself to being a public servant, this is unbelievable.

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Kimi Jackson: I appreciate you saying that. But for me, I feel fortunate to get to work with a population who needs our help so much and yes, it can be difficult to know that we cannot fill the need but we focus on helping the people who are able to help and we know what a great difference it makes in their lives and sometimes, I get contacted by a child who I represented years ago and who has now grown up and maybe gone to Community College and has a job now, calls me back, speaking English when before he spoke only Spanish, very proud to speak English now, and to have gone to school and to have built a life for himself or herself. And that means so much to me.

So our work is hard, but we also get wonderful rewards for doing it.

Rocky Dhir: As we try to kind of get our arms around this, if you could, can you encapsulate maybe some of the ways that — we’ve talked about it over the last several minutes but let’s just try to re-emphasize it, how can people help and who do they contact, or is there is a website or some place they go to, to try to get involved? Can you just kind of give us a quick overview of what we can do to help?

Kimi Jackson: Sure. So our website is a page of the American Bar Association’s website, so it’s americanbar.org/probar, that’s a page on the American Bar Association’s website, and from there, you can get the contact information and more information about ProBAR.

You can email us, the general email addresses [email protected]. We always welcome donations, the site is donate.americanbar.org/immigration and there you can choose ProBAR or one of the ABA’s other immigration projects.

I encourage people who might be interested in working here to look at our website and see what positions are available for attorneys or non-attorneys and entry-level attorneys or attorneys with more experience and those are available on the American Bar Association website. You check for careers at the ABA and then search Harlingen, Texas and there you will find the positions at ProBAR.

I hope that answers the question and I really appreciate your focus today on the work that ProBAR is doing.

Rocky Dhir: Well no, I want to thank you for being here. I mean it’s — I think you’ve opened up a lot of eyes today and just introduced us to a world that most of us never see. So even as lawyers, we think we see a lot but clearly, there is still a lot out there. This is just a remarkable journey you’ve taken us on today.

Kimi Jackson: Thank you so much.

Rocky Dhir: Absolutely and so ladies and gentlemen, Kimi Jackson with ProBAR, the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. Kimi, I have enjoyed our time together. I hope you dear listener have enjoyed it as well.

This is — it’s just fascinating, I have no words. I’m left speechless, which is rare for me.

So again this has just been a fascinating, fascinating trip through a place that most of us never see. So again, Kimi thank you and thank you dear listener for joining us today.

The State Bar of Texas Podcast tries to take you to some really interesting places both within the law and in the physical world, and we certainly hit both of those today.

So, I want to thank you for tuning in. Life is a journey, we’ll see you next time.

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