The Immigrant Justice Program (IJP) is seeking one attorney at the either Senior (individual contributor) or Sr. Supervising (manager) level. This posting is for the Senior Immigration Attorney. If you’re interested in applying for the Senior Immigration Attorney, please review this link https://secure6.saashr.com/ta/6191828.careers?ShowJob=570830266.

About the Legal Aid Justice Center:

The Legal Aid Justice Center is a nationally recognized, non-profit organization that partners with communities and clients to fight for racial, social, and economic justice. We understand that the harms our clients endure are inextricably linked to overarching systems of injustice. Together we are dismantling those systems through a combination of community organizing, litigation, policy advocacy, public relations, and individual legal services.

Very recently, we helped lead the fight to reform Virginia’s unemployment insurance system including advocacy that resulted in the distribution of over $1 billion in illegally withheld payments to over 160,000 Virginians. During the pandemic, we helped hundreds of families avoid eviction through a combination of legal representation and help accessing rent relief funds. Our staff are on the front lines of some of the most important anti-poverty fights happening today.

Founded in 1967, LAJC has offices in Charlottesville, Richmond, Petersburg, and Falls Church and provides services under six key program areas: Civil Rights & Racial Justice, Economic Justice, Youth Justice, Health Justice, Immigrant Justice, and Worker Justice. For more information, visit www.justice4all.org.

LAJC’s latest strategic plan is available at https://www.justice4all.org/lajc-strategic-plan-2022-2026/#area d.

About the Immigration Justice Program:

LAJC has a long history of serving immigrant communities across Virginia, including individuals without documentation and facing deportation. LAJC’s Immigrant Justice Program works to end mass detention and deportation of immigrants in Virginia, and to break the ties between immigration enforcement and local and state government and law enforcement. We work to ensure that immigrant communities remain intact and protected in Virginia, fight the separation of immigrant families and the exclusion of immigrants from state benefits, and protect young immigrants across the Commonwealth whether in federal custody or in their communities. Previously, the team also supported farmworker campaigns, but in 2022 as the result of its significant growth, LAJC launched a new Worker Justice Program to house the farmworker campaigns, in addition to other worker justice efforts.

LAJC’s recent wins include a coordinated effort to drastically reduce the population of a local immigration detention center down to historically low levels through impact litigation, partnership with long-time organizing efforts and litigating individual habeas corpus petitions; increasing the eligible age for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status children; ending mandatory ICE notifications for misdemeanor arrests; and establishing in-state tuition and state-funded financial aid for undocumented students with pending asylum applications who graduate from Virginia high schools. In addition to individual legal defense of immigrants facing removal proceedings and federal litigation on behalf of detained immigrants, our attorneys and organizers partner with local community members and community groups as well as national advocacy organizations to promote systemic reforms reducing the abuse and exploitation of immigrants, and to advocate for policies that promote integration and protection of immigrant communities.

About the Position:

The Legal Aid Justice Center seeks to hire a Senior Immigration Attorney for our Richmond office. The attorney will be responsible for helping develop and implement strategies to end mass detention and deportation of immigrants in Virginia, break the ties between immigration enforcement and local and state government and law enforcement, ensure that immigrant communities remain intact and protected in Virginia, fight the separation of immigrant families and the exclusion of immigrant youth from state benefits like in-state tuition, and protect your immigrants across the Commonwealth whether they are in federal custody or in their communities. 

Applying the principles of community lawyering and working on an interdisciplinary team, the attorney will work closely with organizers, families, community members, local, state and national-level partners, and other LAJC advocates to advance systemic change in immigrants' rights in Virginia through a combination of individual representation, impact litigation, community outreach, and policy advocacy. This position will maintain or supervise a practice that primarily involves immigration issues but could incorporate cross-program work as needed. They attorney may also assist in teaching the University of Virginia School of Law's Immigration Law Clinic, ensuring that clinic cases are professionally and successfully litigated by the law students and also advance strategic goals. 

Job Duties:

• Through supervision and coordination with the director, help monitor and advance the central Virginia docket of individual cases to ensure community needs are met. This includes handling direct representation cases and community immigration consultations.
• Take a leadership role in various impact campaigns (including federal litigation, state and local advocacy, and grassroots community lawyering) affecting immigrant communities in and around Northern Virginia and statewide.
• Possibly assist in co-teaching the Immigration Law clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, with six students and a docket of consisting primarily of removal defense cases.