NIPNLG and NPAP Albuquerque, NM CLE Seminar Registration Information

Law enforcement misconduct perpetrated against the immigrant community is an ever-increasing problem throughout the country. This seminar provides a forum for immigration and civil rights practitioners to learn from each other and join forces to successfully litigate for more government accountability.

In separate sessions, immigration attorneys will be introduced to the basics of legal actions under Section 1983, Bivens and the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), and other statutes that are available to hold state and federal law enforcement officers accountable. At the same time, civil rights attorneys will learn about the intricacies of immigration law and how their skills at litigating police misconduct cases can be extended to government abuse in the immigrant community.

Joint sessions will cover an in-depth look at Bivens and FTCA claims, how to survive a motion to dismiss and how to best conduct discovery. Break-out sessions provide time for discussions among the participants.

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PROGRAM

TRACK I OR TRACK II (CHOOSE ONE)

9:00 - 10:30AM

Track I: Deportation & Detention 101

•Overview of types of misconduct and abuse in the immigration context

•Overview of the deportation process from the point of arrest to expulsion.

•Identification of key law enforcement and health agency players in the

immigration system and level of force authorized

•To sue or not to sue? The interaction of misconduct litigation and

immigration proceedings.

Track II: Accountability Litigation 101

•Actions covered to include: Section 1983, Bivens and FTCA, other

available statutes

•Basics: defendants, actionable conduct

•Relief: damages v. injunctive relief

•Quantifying damages

•Attorneys’ fees & fee agreements

10:30 - 11:00AM COFFEE/TEA BREAK

JOINT SESSIONS

11:00AM - 12:00PM

Federal Tort Claims Act and Bivens

•FTCA administrative complaint

•Exhaustion, deadlines, statutes of limitations

•Framing the claims/filing the complaint

•Combining FTCA and Bivens actions

12:00PM - 1:00PM LUNCH BREAK (BOX LUNCH)

1:00PM - 2:10PM

Surviving Dispositive Motions

•Jurisdictional Obstacles: INA §§ 242(g) & 242(b)

•“Discretionary function” exception

•“Special Factors”

•Equitable relief: “Real and Immediate” threat of future harm

•Defenses: absolute and qualified immunity

2:10 - 2:20PM AFTERNOON BREAK

2:20PM - 3:30PM

Discovery Workshop

•Discovery overview

•Obstacles and strategies

•Using FOIA in discovery

Break-Out Sessions

3:30PM - 4:30PM

•Documenting Abuse

•Detention-Related Litigation: Abuse, Lack of Medical Care, and Unlawful Custody

•Challenging ICE Enforcement Initiatives

•Raids & Motor Vehicle Stops

Ask the Experts

4:30PM - 5:00PM

Concluding Q & A

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FACULTY

MICHAEL AVERY is a Professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston and a former President of the National Lawyers Guild. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he was a trial lawyer for 28 years before joining the Suffolk faculty in 1998. He specializes in constitutional law and civil rights cases, particularly civil actions based on law enforcement misconduct. Among the hundreds of such cases he filed, Prof. Avery was lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Cerro Maravilla case, based on the police murder of Puerto Rican independence activists in 1978. He currently represents plaintiffs in cases stemming from the FBI scandal in Boston, which involved the imprisonment for three decades of innocent men as a result of FBI suppression of exculpatory evidence. He has argued civil rights cases in the United States Supreme Court and several circuit courts. Prof. Avery is a co-author of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation, the leading treatise in the field of law enforcement misconduct litigation, and has published several articles on police misconduct. In addition, he is the editor of the recently published collection of essays, We Dissent, a critical review of civil liberties and civil rights cases from the Rehnquist Court. Michael Avery serves on the Board of Directors of NPAP.

MARY LOU BOELCKE has been practicing civil rights law since 1992. She lives in Albuquerque, NM where she is in private practice. Mary Lou graduated the University of Oregon School of Law in 1991, Order of the Coif, and started practicing law in Chicago where she worked and lived until 1998. During this time she won several class actions brought under Section 1983 against the City of Chicago and Cook County Sheriff. Mary Lou litigated numerous prison denials of medical care cases and won a claim for denial of medical care on Motion Summary Judgment in U.S. District Court in Oregon. Mary Lou teaches Legal Research and Writing at Central New Mexico Community College in the Paralegal Studies Program. She is a member of the NLG since 1988; at the same time she joined the ACLU where she has been a cooperating attorney since 1995. Mary Lou is also member of NPAP since the inception of the project in 1999.

LYNN COYLE began her career at the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center in Chicago where she defended clients from deportation and handled family-based immigration cases. Three and a half years later, she joined the Texas Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Antonio, Texas, where she represented clients in law enforcement misconduct cases and challenged unlawful immigration practices. A year later, she opened the El Paso Lawyers' Committee office where she continued her practice of litigating civil rights actions on behalf of immigrants. Ms. Coyle is currently at partner at the law firm of Dominguez & Coyle in El Paso, Texas, where she represents clients in civil rights and employment discrimination cases. She is a frequent faculty member at trainings for the immigration and criminal defense bars on the national, regional, state, and local levels.

KING DOWNING is an attorney and Director of the Human Rights-Racial Justice Center, which provides policy analysis and advocacy on race and policing issues, including serving as advisor to the Sean Bell Justice Project, created by the family of the police shooting victim. He is former national coordinator of the ACLU's Campaign Against Racial Profiling, which worked to identify and end racial disparities in policing both federally and locally, with the organization's state affiliates and chapters. Downing received his B.A. from Harvard University and is a graduate of Rutgers School of Law. He is an NPAP member.

JONATHAN FEINBERG is a partner in the Philadelphia law firm, Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg LLP. He joined the firm in 2002 after completing a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Jan E. DuBois of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Jon is a 2001 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Jon focuses his practice on civil rights litigation and criminal defense, with occasional federal-court litigation of immigration matters. Jon was an adjunct faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Civil Practice Clinic during the 2007-2008 school year, and he frequently serves as an instructor in continuing legal education courses and as a speaker in law school classes. He is a member of the National Immigration Project and NPAP.

COLLEEN FLYNN is in private practice. Her practice areas include civil rights, police misconduct, employment, and false-claims litigation. Along with two other Guild attorneys, Ms. Flynn is also currently litigating a Freedom of Information Act case against the Department of Defense on behalf of the NLG’s Military Law Task Force. Before going into solo practice, Ms. Flynn worked for attorneys Robert Mann and Donald W. Cook, Cynthia Anderson Barker, and Barry Litt on class action civil rights cases regarding jail sanitary conditions and strip search policies as well as police misconduct in the city of Maywood and the constitutionality of California Vehicle Code §14602.6, which allows for the seizure and impoundment of vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers. Ms. Flynn has also worked as a part-time detention attorney with Esperanza Immigrants Rights Project. As a detention attorney, she conducted know-your-rights trainings and individual orientations for immigrant detainees in the Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail with the goal of educating immigrant detainees about their rights so that they can participate more meaningfully in their defense and learn how to best protect themselves from the immigration consequences of criminal convictions. Ms. Flynn has worked closely with the immigrant rights community through running legal clinics in the city of Maywood, representing car wash workers and legal observing as part of the Car Wash Worker organizing campaign, and representing individual and organizational plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department for its May 1, 2007 attack on the immigrant community in MacArthur Park. Ms. Flynn, a fluent Spanish speaker, participated in both the 2004 and 2009 SHARE/NLG election observing delegations to El Salvador. Ms. Flynn received her J.D. from Southwestern Law School in 2004 and her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she majored in Comparative Literature. While in law school, Ms. Flynn was a judicial extern to the Honorable Harry Pregerson at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and to the Honorable Dr. Juan Carlos Maqueda of the Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación de Argentina. Ms. Flynn is a board member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and of the NPAP.

Vicki B. Gaubeca is the Director of the Regional Center for Border Rights of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. Vicki joined ACLU-NM most recently from Tucson, Arizona, where she was a passionate advocate and supporter for both immigrant rights and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community (LGBT). She has participated in numerous university and community LGBT groups and committees, including Wingspan, Equality Arizona and the University of Arizona OUTReach group, where she helped obtain domestic partner health benefits for state employees. In addition, she took leadership roles in campaigns that aimed to defeat anti-LGBT legislation in Arizona. The Regional Center for Border Rights is currently coordinating the development of a binational, border-wide online documentation system.

Philip Hwang is Director of Policy and Programs at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, where he litigates cases in the area of immigrant and refugee rights. Mr. Hwang has served as co-lead counsel in several lawsuits against the United States for the abuse of immigrants and refugees. The San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee has brought over a dozen lawsuits against immigration agents on behalf of U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and refugees who were mistreated.

OMAR C. JADWAT is Staff Counsel with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. He joined IRP as a Skadden Fellow in 2002 after graduating magna cum laude from New York University Law School and serving as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl. His practice includes litigation relating to immigration enforcement by state and local police. In a previous career, he worked as a development researcher in South Africa.

BRIGITT KELLER is the Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP). She holds a law degree from her home country Switzerland and an LLM in American Law from Boston University School of Law. She is admitted to practice law in New York.

DAN KESSELBRENNER is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and the co-author of Immigration Law and Crimes (West Group, 2009.) He is Clinical Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. A former member of President Clinton's Transition Team, he assisted in preparing and writing a report to the Clinton-Gore administration regarding the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He co-teaches the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School with Clinical Professor of Law Michael Wishnie. He is a past recipient of AILA's Jack Wasserman Award for excellence in litigation.

Javier N. Maldonado is a lawyer in private practice in San Antonio, Texas who specializes in representing individuals in complex federal and state litigation in the areas of immigration, employment disputes, criminal defense and civil rights. He attended Columbia University for both undergraduate and law school and then clerked for the Hon. George P. Kazen in Laredo, Texas. Prior to entering private practice, Mr. Maldonado was employed with Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of Texas. Mr. Maldonado regularly presents at state and national conferences on civil rights and immigration matters. He is a member of the National Immigration Project.

SUNITA PATEL is currently a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she litigates racial profiling, immigrant justice, and other human rights concerns. She is counsel for Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices and Turkmen v. Ashcroft, the class action suit on behalf of Arab and Muslim men rounded up in immigration sweeps after 9/11. Sunita recently argued Cardenas-Abreu v. Holder before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a petition for review challenging the Board of Immigration Appeals' precedent opinion holding that a New York late-filed, yet pending, direct criminal appeal provides sufficient basis for a removal order. Prior to her position at CCR, Sunita held a Soros Justice Fellowship at The Legal Aid Society, Immigration Law Unit in New York where she represented immigrant detainees in removal proceedings and worked with criminal justice and human rights groups to create independent community oversight for detention operations through public accountability boards. Sunita is a former law clerk for the Honorable Judge Ivan L. R. Lemelle in the Eastern District of Louisiana. She published an article in 2006 entitled "Performative Aspects of Race: 'Arab, Muslim, and South Asian' Racial Formation After September 11" in the UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal. Prior to law school, Sunita investigated conditions of confinement in Alabama and Georgia juvenile detention centers, prisons, and jails as a paralegal at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. She is a member of the National Immigration Project.

DAN POCHODA is the Legal Director of the Arizona ACLU and was counsel in successful statewide racial profiling litigation against DPS; currently he is representing plaintiffs in the challenge to profiling by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He joined the ACLU after ten years of private practice focusing on civil rights and racial discrimination matters. From 1990 through 1996, he served as Special Master for the U.S. District Court in three cases involving constitutional challenges to conditions of confinement in the Arizona prison system. He also was adjunct professor in 2001 at Arizona State University’s School of Justice and Social Inquiry. Prior to relocating to Arizona, Pochoda served as an Associate Professor at the City University of New York School of Law, a position he held from 1986 through 1995. In addition, he taught constitutional law at CUNY’s Center for Urban Legal Studies from 1982 through 1985. He served as Special Counsel to the New York City Board of Correction and as a staff attorney for the New York City Legal Aid Society Prisoner’s Rights Project, arguing numerous cases at the trial and appellate levels, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. He began his legal career with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Pochoda received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College. Dan Pochoda is a member of NPAP and the National Immigration Project.

TRINA REALMUTO is a Staff Attorney at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild where she focuses on government accountability and removal defense issues. Prior to joining the Project, she spent over five years working with the Legal Action Center of the American Immigration Counsel. In private practice, she litigated select immigration appeals and habeas corpus actions. Trina began her career as an associate attorney at the law firm of Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale in San Francisco, where she focused on removal defense and federal court litigation.

STEPHEN M. RYALS is a principal of Ryals & Breed, P.C. in St. Louis, Missouri. The focus of his practice is Section 1983 and other civil rights litigation, dealing with police misconduct as well as other constitutional cases. He is the author of numerous articles and papers regarding Section 1983litigation and the book Discovery and Proof in Police Misconduct Cases (Aspen Publishers). Steve currently teaches civil rights courses as an adjunct professor of law at the Saint Louis University School of Law and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He frequently lectures throughout the country at continuing legal education programs on topics surrounding police officer and entity liability under Section 1983. He has been certified as a Specialist Instructor by the Peace Officer Standards and Training (P.O.S.T.) Commission for the State of Missouri and has instructed police officers and police officer recruits at several police academies in the St. Louis area. He is former General Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Eastern Missouri. Steve has prosecuted civil rights cases in state and federal courts in Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee and California, has argued before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Eighth and Seventh Circuits, and is admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of NPAP.

PAROMITA SHAH has served as Associate Director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild since 2005 and specializes in legal issues related to immigration detention and enforcement. She is a contributing author and co-presenter of the “Deportation 101” curriculum and has authored public education materials for communities affected by heightened immigration enforcement efforts. Previously she served as the Detention Project Director of Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition in Washington, DC., where she conducted monthly legal rights presentations in regional county jails in Virginia for immigrants detained by DHS, mentored and trained attorneys for direct representation, assessed and analyzed claims for relief requested by detainees, coordinated local advocacy efforts, and participated in liaison meetings with DHS and DOJ. Paromita also spent four years as a staff attorney in the Immigration Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services specializing in domestic violence cases.

CECILLIA WANG is Managing Attorney of the California office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants' Rights Project and a member of the National Immigration Project. Her practice includes issues at the intersection of criminal law and immigration. From 1998 to 2002, Cecillia was a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society in New York. She has also worked at the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, where her practice focused on white collar criminal defense. She has served on the Criminal Justice Act indigent defense panel for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Cecillia is a 1995 graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and to Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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