After receiving one of the country's most prestigious public-interest law fellowships, Yale Law School student Bill De La Rosa ’16 will embark on his most far-reaching project yet.
With the two-year Skadden Fellowship, De La Rosa will join the Arizona nonprofit Florence Project to launch a pilot program to provide every individual facing deportation with a lawyer—a model known as “universal representation.
In legal circles, the Skadden Fellowship is likened to Supreme Court clerkships or Rhodes Scholarships. Focused on supporting public-interest attorneys, the fellowship enables recipients to work full-time for two years to help people living in poverty who are also struggling with civil legal issues.
When De La Rosa begins his fellowship at the Florence Project next summer, his main responsibility will be to provide direct services to people being held in detention centers and facing removal proceedings.
“I will serve as the proof-of-concept attorney to demonstrate what a full docket of universal representation would look like,” he said, adding that he'll also be keeping close track of outcomes and collecting data. “By the end of the fellowship, the Florence Project will have enough information to ask partners and funders how to make it a reality.”
Another task will be developing a coalition among affiliated community organizations, grassroot supporters, and government agencies, to eventually scale up the pilot program and sustain funding for it in the long term.
The most novel part of the Florence Project’s universal representation program will be its “merit-blind” approach, De La Rosa said. While several cities or states around the country have a form of publicly-funded universal representation—with New York City being an early adopter—most programs turn away the most complex cases due to limited resources.
“I will be the proof-of-concept attorney, but the whole Florence program will be a proof of concept,” De La Rosa said. “If it succeeds, it will be a model for the entire country.”
De La Rosa first began studying universal representation at Bowdoin, where he majored in sociology and Latin American studies and dedicated himself to understanding immigration issues and policy.
His interest was propelled by personal experience: he was fifteen when his Mexican mother was separated from her ailing husband and their four US-born children. Although Gloria Arellano De La Rosa had been living, working, and raising a family in Arizona for nine years, she was denied reentry for a decade.
After graduating from Bowdoin, De La Rosa attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, earning two master’s degrees in migration studies and in criminology and criminal justice. Supported by a Clarendon Scholarship, he will defend his criminology dissertation at Oxford this spring to earn a PhD.
While in England, he remained focused on the US and its challenges. “I realized that the most effective intervention would be to afford everyone an attorney, to increase their chances of staying in the US,” he said.
If everyone is provided legal counsel, even if their case is not successful, they would at least have been treated humanely and fairly, he added. “I would also argue for affording people an attorney regardless of the outcome,” he said. “It restores some dignity to their experience.”
De La Rosa, who will earn his JD from Yale University in May, makes the case for universal representation as a lawyer does—methodically, point by point, while always stressing the importance of protecting people's rights and dignity.
The first argument he makes is that denying counsel to those in deportation proceedings stands in contrast to criminal proceedings, where the Sixth Amendment guarantees representation in the US. “It's interesting to think about that: criminal defendants face the threat of imprisonment.That’s a huge consequence,” he said.
“And in many ways, you could argue that people facing removal proceedings might be confronting greater consequences: potential family separation, exile from their home and country, and the possibility of facing violence or death abroad. Despite these enormous consequences, people aren’t guaranteed counsel.”
He also notes that the repercussions of keeping someone in the United States extend beyond the individual.
“What it means practically is that the person can remain with their family. Their stability is restored. Children can have a parent to help raise them, and generationally, those children will have better outcomes—and their children will, too,” De La Rosa said.
“Preventing an individual’s removal has a generational, transformative effect. That is the power of affording someone counsel and increasing their chances of fighting deportation.”
