This year’s Latinxs in the Law Lecture featured Luis Angel Reyes Savalza ’15, immigration attorney and director of community empowerment at Pangea Legal Services in San Francisco.
Hosted by the Latinx Rights Scholars Program on October 24, Reyes Savalza delivered a speech entitled, “Community Resistance and Immigrant Rights in the Age of Trump,” in which he urged the immigrant rights movement to focus less on providing direct services and more on building grassroots, community-led defense efforts. “Immigrants don’t need help,” he said. “Immigrants need accomplices—people to fight alongside them.”
Reyes Savalza is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). As a law student in NYU’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, he co-argued Lora v. Shanahan in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a key case that gave immigrants subject to mandatory detention the right to a bail hearing within six months of detention.
In his speech, he paid tribute to Professor of Clinical law Alina Das ’05 and Professor of Clinical Law Nancy Morawetz ‘81: “I want to thank you for teaching me that someone like me could represent the undocumented while being undocumented myself.”
Posted on November 16, 2017