Gavallia Beauvais worked at Sanctuary for Families in the Spring Semester of 2025, as a
result of a donation to Fordham Law School, underwritten by the New York Women’s Bar Association Foundation. Gavallia wrote a beautiful report of her time there, wherein she describes the various opportunities she had to engage in tasks and assignments to learn more about immigration law.
Among the work she did was to review “Special Immigration Juvenile Status” (SIJS) cases and assist the Sanctuary attorneys to complete court forms for supporting guardianship applications on behalf of SIJS minor clients. In her report, Gavallia describes how she researched and wrote memoranda on critical issues such as immigration status and removal proceedings. We can tell that Gavallia learned a lot and enjoyed her time at Sanctuary. In closing, Gavallia remarks that her externship was particularly valuable in “how heavily it was driven by real-world application as opposed to the more theoretical focus of my other law school courses.” Good job, Gavallia!
NYWBA FELLOWSHIP AT SANCTUARY FOR FAMILIES
By Rachel Blume, Law Student, Fordham University School of Law
For the final semester of my law school career, I had the opportunity to work with the Immigration Intervention Project at Sanctuary for Families. I had previously worked closely with survivors of gender-based violence and my work at Sanctuary expanded my horizons to the intersection of different legal challenges immigrant gender-based violence survivors face. This niche area of law provided me with new challenges in learning how to communicate with clients to gather important information while balancing their need to share their stories and receive validation. For many clients, speaking about the abuse they endured was very difficult. I used my trauma-informed lawyering skills to ask questions in a way that made clients feel as comfortable as possible discussing some of the worst moments of their lives.
I worked with two incredible attorneys on the Immigration Intervention Project, Deirdre Stradone and Elizabeth Wood. I enjoyed having multiple supervising attorneys because I learned unique strategies from both about how to approach client meetings, drafting motions, and revising my own work. They both provided me with great feedback that I hope to incorporate in my future legal career.
This semester I worked several different types of immigration cases with clients from around the world with a common goal of finding safety and security in the United States. These clients’ vulnerabilities made working with them even more challenging than other previous survivors I had worked with in separate contexts. I worked on several asylum cases in the beginning of the semester and this experience gave me insight into the nuances of drafting a strong asylum application for clients. Working asylum clients made me appreciate the need for trauma-informed lawyering and bringing in my prior experience working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence. I enhanced and honed my communication skills by working with asylum clients as well as clients on other types of immigration cases.
I also worked in filing for a Special Immigrant Juvenile Status case for a young woman about to age out of the ability to file for the status. This case showed me the interactions between family court and immigration courts and the movement between the two systems to help secure legal status. Additionally, I aided in filing for VAWA application and T-Visa application. Getting to work on multiple types of cases taught me about how to frame my legal arguments in the best light possible to make it easy for others to understand and clear why my clients qualified for these statuses.
Working for Sanctuary also allowed me to understand the challenges non-profit organizations face in terms of caseload and resources. There are so many people in need of help and the lawyers often take on many cases to try to give their advice to as many people possible. This sometimes means that lawyers work on tight deadlines and are constantly managing cases and clients. The attorneys at Sanctuary do a great job at making their clients feel respected, valued and cared for. This work showed me how much more we should be contributing to agencies like Sanctuary that do so much for our community.
This experience made me appreciate how complex immigration cases are and the struggles immigration clients face trying to establish their lives here in the United States. Immigration clients often have a multitude of needs beyond seeking legal status and aiding them involves helping to connect them to many different resources and systems that can help meet the needs. As a lawyer, it is natural to want to fix all of your clients’ problems but often that puts an enormous toll on attorneys and creates unrealistic workloads that prevent cases from progressing. Working at Sanctuary has taught me to better understand my role as a legal advocate and when I need to outsource certain areas of concern to different support systems. I truly enjoyed working at Sanctuary and will take the skills I learned with me in my future legal work.
