Emma Buckthal who received her JD summa cum laude from the University at Buffalo Law School, was the guest speaker. Ms. Buckthal joined the Bar Association of Erie County’s Volunteer Lawyers Project full time in the fall of 2010, and has focused her legal work on representing non-citizen survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. Her cases have been heard by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Executive Office for Immigration Review, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. She also serves as the non-governmental organization attorney representative on the Western District of New York Human Trafficking Taskforce.

Ms. Buckthal explained the legal differences among the terms refugee, immigrant, and asylum seeker. She spoke on the legal impact of each category. She discussed the difficulty that asylum seekers–who must be physically present in the United States to request asylum–have in providing evidence that they were personally targeted for violence due to specific reasons, such as their politics, religion, or sexual orientation. Overall violence in the homeland is not a sufficient reason for asylum. As an example, she spoke of a young male client whose evidence iuncluded two bullets still lodged in his body from gang violence in his homeland. She also discussed the long delays in applying for citizenship, which can take years, sometimes decades, to achieve.

She reported the fact that most of the undocumented immigrants in the United States have overstayed their visitor visas.

Regarding human trafficking, Ms. Buckthal explained that it is a common practice among some employers to hire undocumented workers, pay them less than the minimal wage, and threaten them with deportation if they try to protest. This form of slavery can lead to unscrupulous employers inflicting sexual, economic, and social abuse on the workers.

Emma Buckthal speaks to the audience.

Ms. Buckthal left plenty of time for questions prompting discussion of our current immigration system, concluding that comprehensive immigration reform needs to be enacted.

The Bar Association of Erie County’s Volunteer Lawyers Project was created by Neighborhood Legal Services to offer free services to low income persons and small nonprofit organizations. Immigration assistance is one of their areas of service, including assisting people detained at Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, NY, representing non-citizen survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, and working to obtain permanent residency for unaccompanied children through

special immigrant juvenile provisions of the law.

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