Welcome to Louisiana lefty, a podcast about politics and community in Louisiana where we make the case that the health of the state requires a strong progressive movement fueled by the critical work of organizing on the ground. Our goal is to democratize information, demystify party politics and empower you to join the mission, because victory for Louisiana requires you. I'm your host. Lynda Woolard, and well, here we go again. Unbelievably, we're facing another Trump presidency, while this one will be different than the last time. We have some idea of what we're facing based on our experience with his first term, the things he's already told us he plans to do, and the people he surrounded himself with To that end, for this episode, I went to my good friend Kathleen gasparion, a New Orleans immigration lawyer who I've been wanting to have on the podcast for quite some time. I thought she could help us prepare for some of what the incoming administration has broadcast will be its first and most fervent order of business. Listening to Kathleen speak about her work, her experience and her determination for the battles ahead, I found insight, hope and direction. I believe you may get similar comfort and inspiration from our conversation. I Kathleen gasparion, welcome to Louisiana. Lefty
Lynda, thank you so much for having me. Well,
I always like to start this episode with how I know my guests and I have known you. I feel like forever we do not know each other through our respective career fields. We know each other socially, for the New Orleans music scene, absolutely, but we have always kind of also had these parallel paths where we're aware of what the other is doing, because they are peripherally connected as you work as an immigration lawyer, and that's right, yeah, so that's certainly something that in the political sphere often has a lot of import. So I did want to have you on because of the results of our most recent presidential election to have, and I've been talking about having you on forever, first of all, but this seems like a very opportune moment to have you on to talk about immigration and the space we're in right now. But before we kind of dig into my questions for you, tell me a little bit about, first of all, how you got interested in immigration, and then just give us a little bit of background on how you got to where you are, the space you're in now, and immigration law, wow. So
I have you know when you hindsight is always illuminating, right? And you can look back and you can see, oh, this is exactly how this path unfolded. But I mean, the truth of the matter is, is I kind of fell into immigration a long time ago. I was, I am a military brat, so I grew up all over and also, you know, had gone to college, you know, got a degree in English and business minor, and then, like, basically, spent my 20s doing what you're supposed to do in your 20s, right, goofing off and having, you know, jobs that were not careers, and I ended up working at Loyola in the international student office for a really amazing woman, Debbie Danna, doing j1 programs, and, like, just helping out, like whatever. And she was the impetus that had me go to law school. And I went to law school knowing I wanted to do immigration, that I wanted to continue working with people and sort of helping them find their paths or their journeys, or helping them get to the places they wanted to be. And anybody who's talked to me for more than 10 minutes knows I'm a very proud Armenian, very proud descendant of immigrants, and so very much in my family, like immigration is really important, and also that, you know, as part of, like my growing up, like the idea that we serve others, we serve the community, and It's through community we all get better, was definitely very much a value in my house growing up. So that's how I got into immigration. So I started practicing immigration law way back when I was doing it, before I went to law school, during law school, and then I started clerking. Doing, doing my judicial clerkship for the immigration court in the fall of 2002 so we were some of the first clerks after 911 which is really pivotal in immigration law, just in terms of changes of judicial review. But it meant that I was in a really fascinating place of working on the last Nazi cases and the first modern terrorist cases at the same time and and just from there, I've stayed at, I mean, img is all I do. I've been practicing for over 20 years our firm. I'm really proud of the firm that we have. I have an amazing law partner, Lynda Spivey, and we do. I always say our motto is we bring people here and we keep them here. So we're helping companies work with employees and sponsoring employees. We're helping families come together. We're doing humanitarian work, asylum defense and deportation proceedings, so sort of all of it, and we try to do it with with compassion. I think one of the things that often is missing in the immigration dialog is Respect, respect for the people who are coming here and who are choosing the United States. And so we really try to treat all of our clients with respect.
To clarify, you are having one of those New Orleans tech days. You told me that internet is out now. I well remember how the Internet goes out all the time. So just to very clearly, repeat the name of your firm, your law firm.
So my law partner is Leah Spivey, and the law firm is gasparion Spivey immigration. And we have a location actually in Central City, right on MLK. And yeah, loved being part of New Orleans, except when the internet's not working,
which is too often, too
often, all too often. Yeah,
so I did want to talk about the immigration landscape today, and we can talk, you know, go backwards as well, but there is obviously a great deal of alarm right now.
Sure,
are your without saying anything personal, obviously, but are your clients telling you that they have concern, or is that what you're hearing
so we are, yeah, we are in a time of great xenophobia, right? And where leadership, political leadership, is very xenophobic, and there's a lot of rhetoric, and there's a lot of fear, and there's a lot of misunderstanding, and, you know, it's also the second round for the Trump administration. So our clients, the people who are within our firm, I don't think are freaking out because we've been taking care of them, and, you know, we have things in process for them, and we've been sort of preparing for this moment for a long time. But I do, I think that the immigrant community is scared. Yes, I do. I think every there people in the community, remember, like, how do I explain it? Okay, so, you know, the arc of immigration enforcement is is long and it has, you know, the if you are not in the immigration field, it is hard to explain sometimes about what the patterns of enforcement are like. So the truth is, you know, the underlying statute that we have in immigration law has been the same since 1996 right Congress has not changed the basic, fundamental underlying skeleton of immigration law. What changes one is the funding that the Department of Homeland Security receives, so their ability to enforce the law, the ability to the number of people the Department of Homeland Security can move through the department, and the attitude of enforcement. So it's really in the Obama administration that the Department of Homeland Security has sufficient funding to truly move people through the system in large numbers. Prior to that ins, prior to, you know, 911 the prior the agency was called ins, and it was the red headed stepchild of immigration, I mean, or of the government like it had barely any funding. But as we move through the post 911 landscape, this becomes a real priority, and we start seeing large, large numbers of deportation under Obama, at that time, he had the highest levels of any president, and we had also seen under Obama, large scale raids. That's what we mean when there's been an enforcement action against an employer who's clearly in like, large scale violation of immigration laws of. We saw some of those. We saw I nine enforcement, which is going after employers. So we saw much higher levels of enforcement under Obama, across the board, but we also had really targeted prosecution. The priorities were to get people with criminal issues, um, you know, national security concerns. And then, you know, and then everybody else in the Trump administration firm one, it was an across the board, everybody's a priority. And when you have everybody being a priority, what happens is people who are, you know, pulled over at a traffic stop driving their kids to school. Who's who may be the only thing that they have done wrong. And you know, we can all how wrong is that? Wrong is a is a different philosophical question, but where the only wrong is to have entered without inspection, or the only wrong is to have overstayed a visa, being, you know, taken into detention, prosecuted to the fullest extent of immigration law, in the same way that you would a criminal. And so when everything's a priority and the assessment of the success of the department, or the success of an office, is driven by a certain set of numbers. Well, everybody's gonna just follow those certain set of numbers, and that's putting people into proceedings or whatever. So that's sort of widespread enforcement. More. You know, the other thing we saw under the Trump administration, which began in the Obama administration, but they backed away from it was partnerships with local law enforcement, assisting DHS, or in different ways, cooperating with immigration for enforcement of immigration laws, which leads to all sorts of community issues in terms of racial profiling, and in a bit, you know, communities not necessarily having the faith and trust in the police force that's needed. And you know, we did also see in the in the Trump administration, some you know, not necessarily meaningful. Crackdown on lawful employment, but just, we sort of called it the delay discourage tactic, right? We we making the lawful process take a longer, a lot longer, and be a lot harder than it needs to be. So then, I mean, we come into the Biden administration and enforcement under the Biden administration's more similar to Obama and that there's a priority scheme going after criminals, more so than low hanging fruit. But you know, the Biden administration is also coping with the aftermath of the previous administration and the aftermath of the pandemic, which had a, you know, just like in every sector, there was a large departure from the government. People change jobs. You know, I'm not so happy here. I want to move just like we saw across the board. So the Biden administration had a bunch of different challenges. I also think, you know, it's easy, it's hard in immigration, rather, to explain that there are different issues at play, right? The Southern border and the numbers of people coming to the southern border is a real modern problem, right? This is an issue that truly began in 2014 2015 and has been exponentially growing. And so the the issue in immigration law, the law and I think in terms of, how do we deal with immigration pragmatically, how do we, how do we handle the issues of immigration? Right? There is, I think, one solution, or one approach to individuals arriving at the southern border. And then separately, there's, it's a different issue of, how do we deal with the issue of individuals who are inside the US and maybe have been here for long periods of time and are not in status, right? You know those are. And then the third issue is, of course, you know how to deal with lawful migration, right? Migration through the systems that we have in place, and where those systems succeed and fail. So what is terrifying in the moment is that the rhetoric does not and the leadership is not making a distinction between those three things, between the southern. Border, or recent arrivals, or people who have been here for a long time, or people who are coming through, you know, more regularized, regularized channels of migration, and that creates fear, right? Even people who have been here a long time have residents, I get calls about, like, you know, can they take my citizenship away? Or can they take away the citizenship of my children? Because the because the rhetoric is that explosive, well, and
I don't know if you know the answer to that question, but, I mean, Stephen Miller is certainly talking about denaturalizing,
sure. You know, the good news is, is the ship is is really big, right? And it's not a skiff, it's not a motorboat, it is a giant landmass. And turning the giant landmass around is really difficult. The other thing is the law itself, there's great protections in citizenship. It is traditionally, historically, incredibly difficult to denaturalize. The burdens are really high. So for those of you who don't know us, citizenship is acquired in a few different ways. One is by the the lottery of birth, right? Like, if you're lucky enough to be born in the geography of the United States, you're a citizen. You can be born outside of the United States to US citizen parents. And then there's pathways to citizenship where you naturalize, meaning you didn't start off as a citizen, but you go through a process that ends in in being a citizen, it's really difficult to take away any kind of citizenship, and it's usually only with, you know, treason, or, you know, basically acts of treason, or proving that you obtained your your, you know, your citizenship through fraud. And that's something that would have to go through the federal court. Where I think people are mostly concerned is this idea of changing, changing the rules of citizenship. We call it birthright. Birthright citizenship, right, acquiring citizenship by where you were born, right, with the geography of birth. Not everybody who's born in the US is a US citizen. If you were born in the US and your parents are diplomats, meaning they're in the US on diplomatic visas, you are not a citizen of the United States. I think where the you know the rhetoric of the administration is to expand that to if the parents do not have papers, or if the parents aren't in status, or if the parents are non immigrants, then the child does not automatically acquire citizenship. And there are countries in this world that have that, but it's not, you know, it is not something that has gained traction in the US, and partly because of, you know our history with slavery, and our history like with birth, why we have this birthright protection in the birth in the first place? And you know those types of laws are they target the the most vulnerable of of our country. And so could that change? Sure, it'll take an act of Congress. It's not something that the President by himself can implement. And so yeah, but it's, and it's, you know, immigration is one of those areas of law where things can often be retroactive, and every lawyer is like, Oh my God, that's so weird. And I'm like, I know, but I don't think naturalization is something and citizenship is something where I do feel that the checks and balances of the judiciary would come in. And it's just, I know that they're not. Everybody has the same faith in the judiciary as I do, and probably with good reason. But I think when it comes to this issue, I think it's, it's so fundamental I still have I am very hopeful of the future of it.
Well, I'm heartened by your confidence. Frankly, you know, honestly, I didn't know you and I have not talked in a while, and certainly not since the election, and I wasn't quite sure what frame of mind you would be in. So I'm actually a little comforted by your confidence in this. I know you're not saying there will, there won't be any pain for any of these immigrant communities, but you at least sound like you're you're not. You're not seeing 20 million people deported, is what I'm asking.
It's like, well, it's you. Know, it is a it's a mathematical equation, okay? It's like, so here's some things that like, give me cold comfort, right? Which is so in the first Trump administration, they tried to staff up CBP, so that's Customs and Border Protection. Those are the guys at the airport. Those are the guys along the southern border. Those are the horrible, you know, photos you've seen in the news. But this is the first line at the southern border. People who are, you know, are, you know, they're inspecting the cars, dealing with people. And there was a huge push for hiring the Department of Homeland Security, just like wasted, wasted tons of money trying to, like, work with these different companies to get to hire officers, they changed the rules, they lowered the requirements for who could be a CBP officer. And just the truth of the matter is, is like nobody, nobody applied, right? Like they, they made it so, like you could be an officer and still have felony convictions and things like that. So the the machinery to do 20 to process, 20 million people is, you know, is we, there's no infrastructure for that right now. Like we don't have the infrastructure to deal with what we have in process, in the court. You know, the thing is, is, if I'm inside the US, and I'm not along the border, and I and I'm I have contact with ice most of the time, with some exceptions, right? If I haven't been in deportation proceedings before I'm entitled to removal proceedings. Well, the removal proceedings before the courts, you know, it's, it's easily four to seven years for a hearing. The the amount of scaling up that has to happen, and the finances that have to happen for that to happen, are intense. And if you want to do away with removal proceedings, well then you got to get this. To get the Senate to pass new law. And we've been waiting for substantive immigration law for 20 years, right, since 19 or even more than that, since 1996 so, I mean, so I
I,
I am. I'm not optimistic. I'm just like a realist about the machines in place, the, you know, the number of people that work in DHS versus the number of that they're talking about process. What I do find, I think the great joke will be, you know, you know, it's not going to be 20 million people that get processed. I do think it's going to be a lot of people that that do get deported, because there are people walking around with criminal convictions and prior orders, which means they don't get to go in front of an immigration judge. They're, you know, they'll get fast tracked out, and then at the end, he goes, Well, look, oh yeah, we, we only did a million. Look how nice we are right, like, that's what I worry about, in terms of, how do I feel about what this administration is going to be? I am, you know, we've, we've been through it before. We know what we we have an idea of the playbook. It will be awful. It will be awful. There are going to be families that are torn apart. There are going to be people who have protection right now who will not have protection by the end of the time, and whether they are. You know how their process will will remain to be seen. And you know that's the things like kids who have DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. So these you know we're we know that part of the playbook is to go after protections for women and children and victims of crimes. We know in the past that part of the attack was to really narrow and restrict the interpretations of asylum law to make it so that, you know, most people will would not qualify. Um, so, but there is still due process, and there's still a constitution, and there's still a statute, and there's still principles of legal construction. And our job as lawyers right, our job as advocates is to make sure they follow the law, and if they're going to put 10 million people in immigration court. Well, then on those 10 million people, we have to file 10 million motions per person, right? And essentially break the machine. You know, it's by, you know, we have to be just as as aggressive in the fight. Yes, the law is not on our side, but that doesn't mean there's not a fight to be had. And I've been doing immigration for such a long time that and we've, I've, you know, I've have, I have literally had cases that have taken me 12 years and or more, and sometimes you win by slowly losing. And it feels really It feels like a mountain coming down. It feels really horrible. And if you look at it, and if you listen to it without actually thinking about, how do we, how do we fight back, it does feel really overwhelming. But, I mean, the truth of the matter, I mean, it's warfare, you know, we're going to dig some trenches, we're going to plant some spikes, we're going to put glass and barbed away wire, barbed wire, over the top of the wall, and we're just going to dig in and have to fight and, and I do, you know, and then hopefully there's a point where, where there's enough public outcry, where, when farmers can't get workers and the landscapers can't get workers and the tech company can't get workers, that we change the that the statute changes, the law changes in a way that there's not as much ability for the executive branch to to change things or sway things. Or, you know, I you have to be hopeful, or you can't keep going forward. Yeah,
I and that's I mean with with the Republicans apparently, have all every branch of federal government right now, you see hope for actual, legitimate immigration reform with the Republican Congress. So,
ooh, that's a good question. I don't have a sense yet of how afraid people are of Trump. I mean, I don't know if we're going to know that right away and that and maybe afraid isn't the right word, but to have policies or ideas, you know, separate from and because what I mean is, is there's a quite a, you know, every year there are a handful of really good, bipartisan proposals to fix some or all of immigration law, and they never, you know, they never hit the Senate floor. And at the same time, businesses want immigration reform, right? Basically, every major industry has come forward for immigration reform. States want immigration reform right and in and again, I think you have to separate out the southern border issue from, you know, people who have been here a long time and lawful migration, or more regularized migration. The thing is, is like, I you know, it's just like, it ended up like Tesla has used like, 2000 H, 1b, visas. You know, it's like, the industries need immigration. And so is there a possibility for reform? I think we're going to see, I mean, I'm always hopeful we see small changes that have large impacts, right? It's problems that can be solved with a scalpel, not a club. And so there might be room for some things to come through the but it it's also really difficult to imagine that there is reform until the southern border is not seen as such a crisis. You know, I also always say this, which is like I said, the law we have has been in place since 1996 the issue of undocumented foreign nationals has been an issue since 1996 and yet and everybody has absolutely had theories to solve it, and nobody and It has never been solved. There are so many businesses that rely on undocumented labor, and, you know, there's a reason why it hasn't been fixed. I do think we are still a nation of immigrants, and I still think there is a, you know, there can be. A future for that.
It struck me when you were talking before, because my one of my questions to you that you may or may not have an answer for, but one of my questions to you is going to be like, What can people do to help? But it sounds an awful lot to me like you're saying business leaders, industry leaders, should be part of this solution here,
absolutely. I mean, I think right now I can't believe I know I'm not the only one to say this, right, our greatest act of rebellion right now, besides our mere existence, right, is to be kind and to build community. And this is the thing is, is people hate in the abstract and they love in the individual, right? People like the immigrant that they know, right, this foreign national? Oh, they're not like, they're not the ones they're talking about on TV. Well, guess what? All of them are like the one you know, right? When an individual in your community is taken into custody, not just his, not just the neighbors, need to speak up, but the company where that person was working needs to speak up, right? Like people are here and working. They're working for someone. They're doing different things, like we all need to talk about it, and we all need to be, you know, working together to keep our communities together.
So the caravans, they there are caravans, but they get blown up into bigger proportion based on where we are in election cycles. But what's creating that? What's creating that crisis at the border, besides us just not being able to process people? And, I mean, we can get into all the things like the Fentanyl crisis, which really is more of Americans bringing stuff over the border, right? There's all those nuances to it, but to solve the border crisis isn't just about us putting up more law enforcement. There is. It is part of that equation, us helping countries on the front end.
Yeah, so, I mean, you're talking
so people aren't having fun. I mean, I know there's political violence, that's another thing, but I mean, or gang violence, people might want to escape that. That's but, but if they're just escaping poverty, is there not a role we can play in that
people come? It's like, why are people coming? Why are people showing up at the border? Well, they are coming. You know, it is a push and a pull, right? They are coming. They're people are starting off in, you know, let's say they're starting off in Venezuela, and they're working their way to the southern border, or they're flying in from India or Russia or wherever, and then working their way up. They're not stopping and out at any of the countries in between because of economics. But you know, they're leaving. You know, people lead where they are because not so I like to think it's not so much about their situation, but the situation for who comes after them, right there? Um, some of it is absolutely economically driven. Some of it is absolutely, you know, it's refugee. I can't be in the place where I am, whether that's because of war or I will be harmed. It's all of those things mixed together. The it's, it's not safe, right? It is very violent and and so there's a push and a pull, because there is still, you know, because there's jobs here, there's, there are resources here. And so why people are coming is one thing, how we deal with it as a country, I mean, and I could, like, you know, how did we get to this place where we have such a horrible system at the border? Or so many people coming and it, I mean, it has to do with all sorts of things. It has to do with countries all over, you know, global refusals to accept refugees. It has to do with, you know, global poverty. It has to do with economics. It has to do with the pandemic, and it so many factors that, I think, like maybe, maybe an economist and a socialist social studies professor could, could give you better information on but why do we have the situation we have at the southern border? And it's, it's, it's a combination of our it's, it part of it's our law, right? If I, if I show up and I and I say. I am afraid and I'm found to be credible. That fear is credible, then there's a process by where I get a chance to talk to an immigration judge, or talk, you know, about coming into the United States and having asylum. The way our system is also set up is, if I am coming, I'm entering, essentially as an applicant, I don't have work authorization. You know, there's this expensive either detention or reporting or things like that. I'm not being processed as a refugee at the border, and that makes a big difference in terms of benefits and funds and things like that. And there's also as an arriving alien, right, as a person knocking on the door trying to come in, Department of Homeland Security has the authority to detain me, and so it sort of creates this issue of of just mass numbers of people trying to come in over and over again. So, you know, we, we didn't have these kinds of numbers. You know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. It also, it was a different world. Then it was difficult to or incredibly expensive to get an airplane from, you know, India to Venezuela or wherever, um, you know, are there security risks at the southern border? Absolutely. Some of it fentanyl, some of it's that other stuff, but you have people coming it's not just, you know, it's not just people from Mexico or just people from Honduras who are coming through and being processed. So there's, I mean, there are legitimate concerns, but the questions that don't get asked are, how, what kind of country do we want to be, right? And how do we want to treat human beings these, you know, we can. Can call it a caravan and call it whatever you want. It is still human beings. And you know our responsibility to other human beings as a superpower, right as a country with lots of resources, with lots of jobs and a really incredibly low unemployment rate right now, you know power? You know that's a question. Part of why we have such pressure on the southern border is the fact that our lawful migration system is so broken that it will take, if I'm a permanent resident, it'll take me, you know, five years, eight years, 10 years, to bring my family here. If I'm an employer and I want roofers, the process I have to go through to bring them here legally is going to take 345, years, and the cost is astronomical. So we have a system that does not respond to the demands of its people, the desires of its people, the market, right? Like it's, it's an incredibly, you know, broken system, which then the road doesn't work. But you know, these, these little cracks through sometimes can and when you are afraid for your life, or you need to feed your kids, I think there's lots of things you would do
that's, that's very powerful information. And I want to ask you a really frivolous question. Oh, I
love frivolous Well,
I just wanted to know I because I didn't get to ask you this in real time during the presidential debate, when the they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs. I mean, give me your feedback on that. Okay,
so it's like, I just want to go, can't you come up with some new material? Because the rhetoric literally is the same exact rhetoric that we've seen from anti immigration waves throughout history. So you want to go back to like, oh, the 1890s Guess what? They were talking about, the immigrants eating the cats and the dogs, right? The Italian, the same language they used against the Italians and the the Irish, right? They're full of disease. They're eating the cats and dogs. So it's like part of me is just going you need new material and and then part of me also was heartbroken that offhanded comment becomes so powerful in that it teaches us to see each other as enemies instead of what. What we are, which is, you know, hey, this is a family who's trying to make it from paycheck to paycheck, just like we are, right, like it's, yeah, so it's really heartbreaking. But no, my, my first response was, you know, was, but that's, you know, never be afraid to tweak the nose of the of those in power, right? So,
okay, all right, so, all right. Well, let's go back to for folks, if they're interested in doing stuff, are there, are there groups that you recommend in Louisiana and your area and and I guess maybe part of that conversation Are you still working you started root PB and J at one point in time. Are you still doing anything with that or is
Yeah, so PB and J was a project I did to train immigration law, to train non immigration lawyers how to help kids who needed representation in immigration court. So fun fact, people in immigration court, while they have a right to an attorney, are not provided attorneys, and that includes three year olds. So there's always a great need for helping out kids. And we know that statistically, people who have a lawyer, especially a good lawyer, like the likelihood they're going to win their case is like some astronomical number, like 80% chance is better. So that that idea, that idea, is alive and well with other groups within the city, specifically Catholic Charities and the pro bono project in New Orleans, but I am not running that program directly anymore. I am also co chair of the Louisiana immigration Working Group, which is a coalition of private practice nonprofit people serving the immigrant community to sort of come together and figure out how we can not just do our jobs better, but also help educate, inform, advocate at the state and national level for the immigrant community. So in terms of who, you know, there's so many, there's such great need. Anybody who's in Louisiana knows that we are an underserved population in so many ways in terms of working with immigrants. I mean, I have some pet projects that I adore right Isla, which is immigrant immigration services for Louisiana, which is our page which does direct representation and knows your rights projects. So isla. Isla.org is a phenomenal organization. They need your money. The home is here New Orleans, which is in my neighborhood, in my business neighborhood, right over on Och, which is helping refugees and their families settle within New Orleans. Also doing phenomenal work. Also need your money. Also have volunteers. There's project Ishmael hagars house, Catholic Charities of New Orleans as well, doing great work, but and one of my favorites is an organization called Alas, a L, A S, which is Lisa Marie Rhodes, and their purpose is to help kids who are here so foreign national kids who are here, arriving In the US as kids navigate getting through high school and their immigration process at the same time. And so they're doing some phenomenal work. You know? It's, and there's, there's also national, if you want to be helping out on the southern border, right? Racist, of course, kind Vera all those places, or just the good old ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Clinic are also great resources, as PLC does detention work and other community outreach that's really meaningful. So all of these phenomenal warriors and fighters are doing the good fight, and we're going to do the best we can. I mean, then, you know, it's funny, the day after the election, I dusted off a bag of buttons I had made under the first Trump administration. So many of you may recall that he called that. He called people like me, a bunch of dirty immigration lawyers. So I will be pulling out my dirty immigration lawyer badge and wearing it proudly. I may also have to pull out my flak jacket, you know, just in case the bullets start flying. But, um. You know, we're, we're ready. This is, you know, it's, I'd much rather be busy doing lots of people in an easy time. But if, if my place is to be busy fighting to keep people here, that's what it'll be.
Well, those are wonderful resources, and I'll put as many links as I can in the Episode Notes so folks can find them more easily. Although you actually gave pretty good information that folks should be able to find them just from what you've talked about already. Kathleen, I appreciate so much of your time and your valuable knowledge. I do want to pivot to the last three questions. I ask a version of every episode, okay, and let you get on with your weekend, with your family. But what do you see? And frame this in the context of where we are right now. What do you see as the biggest obstacle towards your your practice and immigration, getting a better immigration system? I don't want to just say we're for right? Yeah, immigration system for the country. What's our biggest obstacle right now?
Um, people need to tell politicians how they really feel about immigration. All of the polls talk about how people really want immigration and they want, uh, their neighbor, their person, their you know, to have status or have a pathway forward. And I think you know speaking out about that. I think you know the the biggest obstacle is fear. Right? Always, people are afraid to speak out. People are afraid to talk about how their business needs and uses foreign nationals, or how they're, you know, how their family, you know, is, has had an immigration experience. And so I think that that visibility, the need for visibility, is one of our biggest obstacles. Right? Everybody has these amazing stories and they're afraid to tell them, and so I think the more we can get it out there, the better.
Okay, and that sounds like a lovely project for folks who aren't in the legal space, but or maybe in creative spaces, could could do like and so tell me your your thoughts on the biggest opportunity we have right now.
Oh, I, I always think, you know, every challenge comes with an opportunity of service and an opportunity of community. You know, in my in my home, are saying is, as a family is, you know, rule one is, don't panic. Rule two is, ask for help. And rule three is probably something like and do everything with a quirky, dark humor. But, you know, it's not official, and I think that's really my mantra going forward, right? Is this is going to be a time when solutions are done through asking for help and working together, if we would, all you know, the more that we unite, the harder we are to take down.
That's lovely. Okay? And last question, who's your favorite superhero?
So, okay, I have to say, I've been thinking about this all afternoon, and I, I have to say, like, of course, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman. I feel like I need to say because female empowerment, but I do think my favorite superhero is Steven Universe. And if you guys don't know Steven Universe, he is a boy who is raised by three superheroes, presenting as women, and his gem is in his belly button, and his superpower is compassion and caring, and I think that's what I need. Going forward,
you've given me homework. I love that. All right. Well, Kathleen, thank you so much for joining me and helping folks wrap their head around where we're headed a little bit better. And as always, thank you so much for everything you have done and continue to do in support of people, vulnerable people in our communities. Thanks,
Lynda, and it was so great to talk to you. Thank you for all you do for our community. You. Thank
you for listening to Louisiana lefty. Please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you to Ben Collinsworth for producing Louisiana lefty. Jen pack of black cat studios for our super lefty artwork and $1,000 car for allowing us to use their swamp pop classic security guard as our Louisiana lefty theme song. You.
