Mass Law Reform is powered by our advocates – talented and committed individuals who work together to fight for the needs of low-income people. Our second advocate is Iris Gomez, a Senior Staff Attorney in Immigration.

Iris Gomez joined MLRI as an immigration attorney in March 1992. A nationally-recognized immigration law expert, she directs MLRI’s Immigrants Protection Project. She is the former chair of the National Immigration Law Center’s board of directors and has played leadership roles in numerous bar associations, government task forces, and community organizations, in addition to teaching immigration law at Boston area law schools. She currently serves as a Trustee of the Hyams Foundation. In addition to her professional accomplishments, she is the author of the Boston Globe best-seller TRY TO REMEMBER, an immigrant coming-of-age novel that won praise from prominent national magazines such as O, The Oprah Magazine as well as an International Latino Book Award.

Q&A with Iris Gomez

What are your areas of expertise? How did you come to work with these issues?

My areas of expertise are immigration law and the law of immigrant rights (i.e., immigrant access to rights and opportunities, such as lawful employment, education, public safety net benefits, and drivers’ licenses, which are often necessary to avoid or overcome poverty.)

I came into this work because I’m a Colombian immigrant who grew up among immigrants who struggled to overcome poverty, social exclusion, and trauma. When I was starting out as a legal services lawyer in a “generalist” office, I had to jump into federal court to seek the release of two detained immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala who needed to apply for asylum. (Years later, they earned their “green cards” under the 1986 amnesty law and I helped the church group that posted their bonds get their money back!)

What advocacy from your time at MLRI are you particularly proud of?

I’m proud of our litigation and parallel administrative advocacy over the last fifteen years that expanded college access to a broad swath of low-income immigrant youth, allowing new generations of immigrants to grow their educational assets, better their own lives and those of their families and communities, and begin to narrow the racial wealth gap.

After the failure of a multi-year campaign for in-state tuition, the law that would have allowed low-income undocumented immigrants to afford a college education, MLRI turned to litigating the denial of in-state tuition to certain groups of lawfully present immigrants whom the state was treating as undocumented – including those who’d applied for permanent residence and were permitted to remain here in the process. This litigation led to broader reforms in state policy that now benefit virtually all lawfully present immigrant groups.

MLRI subsequently challenged the state’s denial of merit-based financial aid – including scholarships – to lawfully present immigrants, such as those holding TPS and U visa status. This litigation resulted in additional state policy changes that benefitted all such immigrants.
During the COVID pandemic, MLRI prevailed in a third challenge, this time to a regulation governing federally funded emergency “CARES” grants; a victory that led to a regulatory change at the national level that made all immigrants eligible for these federal financial aid grants, regardless of immigration status.

MLRI also litigated the state’s denial of need-based aid to DACA beneficiaries and other lawfully present immigrants, and we favorably settled that case on an individual basis but remain committed to advocating for systemic reforms in this space, given recent elections.

What are you working on right now, and why are you prioritizing it?

Together with the rest of the Immigration Team – including our awesome interns – we’ve prioritized a community response to the relatively new federal policy of fast-tracking Haitian, Central American, Brazilian, and other recently arrived immigrants for deportation in Immigration Court. Rapid adjudication time frames and the enormous number of people placed in these so-called “Dedicated” docket cases make it impossible for the vast majority to secure a free or even “low-bono” lawyer.

With groups across the country, we’ve advocated that the Administration abandon this deeply flawed system, but it has continued. Consequently, at the local level, we spearheaded the creation of a public-private partnership among the City of Boston MOIA team, key immigration legal services providers, and our immigrant-led community-based organizations to conduct a series of multilingual legal clinics that deployed legal and lay volunteers to help immigrant participants better represent themselves in their cases.

Going forward, we hope to use information gained from these clinics to track case dispositions for potential due process issues, like meaningful access to counsel, that might be litigated on appeal. The Dedicated Docket work is a priority because immigrant-led CBOs and our legal services sister organizations, to which MLRI provides support, have been overwhelmed by the challenge posed by this system and because access to justice, including to counsel, is fundamental to MLRI’s mission.

What do you wish more people understood about immigration or immigration policy?

I wish everyone could come to know and appreciate the beauty and power of immigrants’ ancestral roots, no matter what the political, economic, or personal circumstances that drove them to this country.