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When the going gets tough, the tough get going: Julia Decker and Margaret Martin join ILCM staff
Posted on Jun 13 2017
From January 20 to the end of March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in our region increased by 80 percent over 2016. That brought a big increase in need for full representation, especially for people in removal proceedings.
Timely, unprecedented support from several Minnesota foundations and hundreds of donors from across the country (including several who made donations in honor of Mr. Donald J. Trump), enabled the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) to hire critical support – two new attorneys who will be able to do life-changing work for Minnesota’s immigrants and refugees.
Meet Julia Decker
Julia Decker first joined ILCM as a full-time, one-year Robina Public Interest Fellow in 2014, shortly after her graduation from the University of Minnesota Law School. During this year at ILCM, she joined a team of lawyers from ILCM, the Center for New Americans, and Faegre Baker Daniels who appealed a removal case up to the U.S. Supreme Court and won in 2015. After her fellowship year, she went back to the University of Minnesota Law School for two years of teaching immigration law and supervising law students representing immigrants and refugees in their immigration cases. Now she is back as an ILCM Community Defense Project staff attorney to provide full representation in removal defense cases and provide Know Your Rights presentations in the community.
Julia is excited to be back with ILCM, advocating for Minnesota’s immigrants and refugees both in court and in the community. She grew up in St. Louis Park and brings a lifetime of engagement with issues of concern to immigrant communities in Minnesota. She speaks Spanish and Mandarin, as well as English.
Meet Margaret Martin
Margaret Martin comes to her position as ILCM’s new Legal Director from New York City, where she served as Director of the Unaccompanied Minors Department at Catholic Charities. Before that, she was a clinical law professor for five years in the Immigration and International Human Rights Clinic at Seton Hall University, and in the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Connecticut. She also worked with the American Bar Association in Uzbekistan and in a clerkship with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of Boston University and the Columbia University School of Law. Her focus on human rights issues emerged early. “I think that protecting the rights of immigrants is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time,” she says.
Since moving here, Margaret has made time to check out her new neighborhood in Minneapolis. She has already used the Midtown Greenway to bike to work, and gone on an inaugural run around the lakes. She says, “it’s a beautiful city.”
As requests for legal presentations and representation more than doubled since November’s election, ILCM has been working overtime to meet increased needs for support and representation. As Julia and Margaret hit the ground running, they are already making a big contribution to meeting those needs.