As a Loyola law student, Maggie Meza (JD’ 19) walked into a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana. What she saw and heard shocked her.

“It was like a high-security prison,” says Meza, who, along with other Loyola law students, volunteered to help the Southern Poverty Law Center gather information for asylum applications. “We couldn’t have cell phones, couldn’t bring anything in but paperwork for the clients we were meeting.” Through glass, Meza and her classmates listened to the harrowing stories of people who had fled to the U.S. to escape threats of harm from gangs or the governments of the countries they’d left.

Meza’s first hands-on experience with immigrants in detention was emotionally taxing and professionally frustrating. Had she and her fellow student volunteers been trained for the social, medical, and other facets of the detention system along with the legal aspects, they could have approached their task with a more complete understanding of the challenges their clients face.

SOURCE: AMERICAN IMMIGRATION COUNCIL

Since Meza’s time at Loyola, when only two immigration law courses were available, the School of Law has vastly expanded its classroom and clinical offerings in immigration law, largely at the impetus of students like her. Now, Loyola University Chicago is launching an ambitious new initiative supported by a $6 million anonymous gift to better prepare both students and professionals to more effectively meet the multifaceted challenges faced by immigrants in the U.S. and around the world.

The new Holistic Immigration Hub pilot brings together experts from law, health care, education, and social work to train future attorneys, judges, social workers, educators, and health practitioners while partnering with Chicago-based immigration organizations and advocating for widespread change in the immigration system. Building on the scope and approach of Loyola’s School of Law and Center for the Human Rights of Children (CHRC), which over the past decade has been active in immigration issues, the Hub will solidify Loyola’s standing as a national thought leader in immigration law.

Filling an urgent need

Unlike defendants in the criminal justice system, individuals in immigration proceedings are not provided court-appointed attorneys if they can’t afford counsel. Immigrants without representation—even small children—must navigate a complex legal system and face adversarial government attorneys alone, often with limited proficiency in English. Access to counsel makes a significant difference in outcomes: According to the American Immigration Council, nondetained immigrants with attorneys are five times more likely to win their cases, and detained immigrants with attorneys are twice as likely to obtain relief. Though legal representation is a game changer, a recent report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that the immigration court backlog is far outgrowing the rate of representation.

“Our community partners cannot keep up with the demand for legal services from immigrants and migrants, including people applying for asylum who’ve been trafficked or are victims of violence and other crime,” says Katherine Kaufka Walts, CHRC director, who’s codirecting the Hub alongside Sarah Diaz, CHRC associate director. “With the Hub, we’re developing a larger pipeline of professionals who can significantly impact immigrants’ and migrants’ lives, in some cases in life-or-death situations.”

A fuller approach

Addressing the complex challenges of immigration goes beyond providing representation and other direct services to individuals, however, and the Hub is holistic in more than its approach to preparing lawyers and other professionals to help clients. Recognizing that piecemeal approaches to immigration issues have been ineffective, Kaufka Walts says, “The Hub’s intertwined goals are leadership, graduating the next generation of professional leaders; service, supporting Chicago organizations; and innovation, catalyzing visionary systemic change.”

Based in the law school, the Hub leverages powerful collaborations with several other schools and amplifies the School of Law’s top-ranked programs.

For its initial strategy, the Hub will prioritize three components: an interdisciplinary Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, an Immigration Law Lab, and an Immigration Innovation Incubator.

The first component, the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, directed by Sarah Diaz, will bridge seminar training and experiential learning and infuse curricula for both with expertise from other Loyola schools, cross-training students on the needs of the client beyond legal representation.

“Examples of that training might include forensic medical and mental health evaluations conducted through the Stritch School of Medicine, case management services conducted through the School of Social Work, and colocation of legal services alongside School of Education graduate students in the Chicago Public Schools,” says Diaz. 

Mutual benefits between partners

The Immigration Law Lab, the second component of the Hub, will extend the resources of academia to colleagues working on immigration outside the University. A first-of-its-kind effort, the lab will coordinate and train law students across Chicago who are interested in volunteering with partner agencies.

Mary Meg McCarthy (JD ’89) is executive director of one of those partner organizations, the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). “What I find most exciting about our partnership is the different strategies the Hub is using,” she says. “Loyola students will be interning and volunteering in client services at the NIJC, and they’ll also be doing research, here and at the law school, that will ultimately help us in our advocacy and with potential litigation issues. So whether they’re representing a client or doing research, they’ll be helping to identify and get involved with systemic issues.”

Katherine Greenslade (JD ’07) is director of the Immigrant Justice Legal Clinic at The Resurrection Project, another partner organization. She agrees with McCarthy on the value of the academic-nonprofit partnership in sharing information and expertise on both sides.

“There’s always more need than there are nonprofit legal service providers, so our partnership with Loyola is critical to meeting this need,” Greenslade says. “It’s a unique way for students to explore their interest in the field, build skills, and make connections. It’s also an opportunity for us to let Loyola know what we’re seeing on the ground and what issues might be ripe for further investigation and research.”

As part of the lab, Diaz and Greenslade coteach a seminar, keeping topics agile and adaptable to meet the current needs of those in the field. This year’s launch included interdisciplinary training on asylum applications. 

The final component of the Hub, the Immigration Innovation Incubator, will address complex, thematic issues—such as climate migration, the treatment of unaccompanied children as adults in miniature, or the cost-benefit analysis of prolonged private detention—through an interdisciplinary lens. The incubator aims to bridge the gap between academia and practice by supporting development of statements, whitepapers, and other documents with and for partner organizations, as well as hosting annual interdisciplinary conferences. It’s also expanding the student-created spring break trip to provide direct services to immigrants at the border by including interdisciplinary faculty.

“In short, we want to change people’s beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes around migration, recentering the dignity of migrants in the conversation, the law, and policy,” Diaz says.

The perfect fit

Loyola is an ideal base for an interdisciplinary, holistic center supporting immigrant justice because of its strong track record in the area—especially in the human rights element of immigration. Among the CHRC’s research projects are reports on labor trafficking of children in the U.S., unaccompanied children in federal custody, the inequitable impact of climate change on various migrant populations, and the difficulty faced by children who were victims of sex trafficking outside U.S. borders in obtaining immigration protections unless the trafficking also occurred within this country. The CHRC has submitted its research to multiple government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, including the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, and has shared it with immigration organizations for use in advocacy efforts.

In keeping with the Hub’s emphasis on involving students in change-making, students play a role in almost all CHRC research. As a former CHRC fellow, law student Sierra Garcia worked on projects including a report on inappropriate use of juvenile criminal records in immigration proceedings—findings that were submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for consideration—and information gathering for a partnership designed to get immigrant and newcomer youths in Chicago schools legal help with immigration proceedings. Being part of a visit to Oakland, California, which already employs a similar partnership, “recharged me and made me realize how much this work really does impact people,” Garcia says.

But perhaps the most important reason the Hub belongs at Loyola is the University’s Jesuit mission, which emphasizes social justice, care for the whole person, and the dignity of every individual.

“The last message Pope Francis gave was about caring for people who are different from us,” McCarthy says. “Immigrants are defined as ‘the other’ right now, but Loyola has that commitment, institutionally and within the individuals it attracts, to be people for others and care for the least among us.

“Our country was founded by immigrants and is richer, stronger, and healthier because of immigrants,” McCarthy adds. “We need to change the narrative to reflect this—and lawyers have a lot of power to do that.”

Learn more about the Holistic Immigration Hub. –Gail Mansfield (August 2025)

Holistic Immigration Hub: The student experience

Law students can choose coursework and experiences that will provide solid grounding to serve as effective immigration attorneys and advocates for systemic change. The Hub prioritizes three components: Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, Immigration Law Lab, and Immigration Innovation Incubator.