The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School hosts a roundtable with Claire R. Thomas and Nina Siulc on Youth Deportation.
In this roudtable, issues related to children and youth deportation will be discussed, such as unaccompanied children in the United States, the reasons for their migration, the challenges they face upon arrival, and an overview of the legal remedies for which they are eligible to obtain relief from deportation.
Claire R. Thomas is an attorney, advocate, and adjunct professor interested in migration, statelessness, human rights, and empowerment for women and girls facing poverty and gender-based violence. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law School and co-teaches a year-long immigration law clinical course as well as an introductory immigration law course. She serves as Director of Training at the Safe Passage Project, a non-profit organization, in which she mentors pro bono attorneys representing immigrant children; coordinates a monthly Juvenile Docket at the New York Immigration Court; and engages in advocacy efforts with other non-profit organizations as well as city, state and federal agencies. Claire is also contract attorney with CUNY Citizenship Now! and assists immigrants applying for naturalization. Previously, Ms. Thomas advocated for the rights of African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants at African Services Committee in Harlem, and was awarded a Community Action Grant from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Claire is a member of the Immigration & Nationality Law Committee of the NYC Bar Association, co-chairs its Immigrant Access to Public Benefits subcommittee. She is currently a Contributing Editor for Anthropology News, a publication of the American Anthropological Association. Her writings have appeared in various law journals and other publications. Claire’s writings are available here.
Nina Siulc is an Affiliated Professor in the Program in Criminal Justice, as well as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Siulc is currently finishing her first book, Unwelcome Citizens, which describes the experiences of Dominican adults who came to the United States as young children and were later deported after being convicted of crimes. In addition to studying how people adjust to life in the Dominican Republic after many years abroad, the book also explores what freedom means in the lives of people who have experienced migration, criminalization, incarceration, and deportation and have been subjected to extreme forms of state intervention in their lives. Siulc’s new research, Children of the Crimmigration Era, involves longitudinal research with children and families in the United States in order to study how parental deportation impacts the socialization and identity formation of the citizen children who remain in the United States. Siulc also has training in ethnographic filmmaking and has worked in a number of engaged research and policy settings. Some of her other projects have involved studying legal rights presentations for detained immigrants to assess how they understand immigration law and make decisions about their deportation cases, interviewing Central American children who have been detained after migrating to the United States, working with social service providers and law enforcement to improve services for persons who have experienced human trafficking, studying the role of religious institutions in helping new migrants adjust to life in the New York City, and working with a local hospital to reduce cultural misunderstandings between Anglo- and Latino- medical staff and Mexican patients.
Prof. Thomas and Siulc are currently visiting scholars at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.
Sponsored by the New School for Social Research.
March 06th, 6pm
Wolff Conference Room, 1103, 11th Floor
6 East, 16th Street, New York.
