Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic

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USF School of Law / Professional Skills / Law Clinics / Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic

The Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic was established in 2015 to represent unaccompanied immigrant children and women with children who have arrived at the southern border and are transferred to Northern California and the Central Valley.

Under the supervision of the director and supervising attorney, students represent clients in all phases of immigration proceedings, at the asylum office, the immigration courts, and adjudication offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Students also represent minors in state probate and family law courts to seek guardianships where appropriate to qualify for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. While the principal focus of the clinic is on unaccompanied immigrant children and related cases, other removal defense cases will likely be added to the caseload over time.

The clinic takes on about 60 cases a year. One client is a teenager from El Salvador who was forced to flee after refusing to join a gang; instead of getting protection from the local police, he was beaten by them because they thought he was associated with the gang. Another is a young woman from Mexico who was fleeing domestic violence and organized crime in Michoacan; the criminal group came to her house threatening to kill the whole family because they wanted her brothers to work for them.

Partners

The clinic partners with Catholic Charities of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin County, and is funded by the City and County of San Francisco and the California Department of Social Services. The clinic also works closely with the Bar Association of San Francisco and Centro Legal De La Raza in Oakland.

Our Stories

Faculty


Bill O Hing

Program Director, Full-Time Faculty
(415) 422-4475

Throughout his career, Professor Bill Ong Hing pursued social justice through a combination of community work, litigation, and scholarship. He is the author of numerous academic and practice–oriented publications on immigration policy and race relations, including American Presidents, Deportation and Human Rights Violations (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019); Ethical Borders—NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration (Temple University Press, 2010), Deporting Our Souls–Morality, Values, and...

Education:

AB, UC Berkeley, JD, University of San Francisco

Expertise:

Asian American Legal History, Immigration Law and Policy, Migration Theory, Public Interest Lawyering, Race, Racism and U.S Law, Racial Justice, Affirmative Action and Diversity, Rules of Evidence, Modern Policing

Jacqueline Brown Scott

Full-Time Faculty
(415) 422-3330

Jacqueline Brown Scott is an immigration attorney with experience solving a wide array of immigration issues pertaining to asylum, deportation defense, and family-based immigration. Jacqueline began her career in immigration law at the San Francisco Immigration Court as an attorney advisor through the Department of Justice Honors Program. There, she wrote hundreds of orders and written decisions for the Immigration Judges. When working at her firm, Law Office of Jacqueline Brown Scott, she...

Education:

JD, University of San Francisco, MA, San Francisco State University, BS, Saint Lawrence University