Rob Rutland-Brown of National Justice for Our Neighbors lives out his faith by helping run legal clinics for low-income immigrants in 10 states
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| The children of Methodist volunteers play with the children of immigrant clients during a Justice for Our Neighbors clinic at Hillcrest United Methodist Church, Nashville, Tenn., 2012. PHOTO: JAN SNYDER |
Coming
from a family of United
Methodist ministers—including his father, grandparents, aunts and uncles—Rob
Rutland-Brown says that his own generation was expected to find a vocation
in the church as well. But after stints working as a schoolteacher and with the
Special Olympics, Mr. Rutland-Brown found a different way to act on his faith:
helping immigrants.
In 1996, while Mr.
Rutland-Brown was a teenager in Florida, one of his cousins and an aunt
co-founded a nonprofit in northern Virginia to provide legal aid to low-income
immigrants who had been seeking advice informally at local churches. Nearly a
decade later, his cousin, Allison Rutland Soulen, decided to devote
herself full-time to legal work at the nonprofit, and Mr. Rutland-Brown—with a
new graduate degree in nonprofit management—took on her job and became
executive director of the group, called Just Neighbors.
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Rob Rutland-Brown, executive director of National Justice for Our Neighbors, stands along the Rio Grande during a January fact-finding mission to the U.S.-Mexico border, near McAllen, Texas. PHOTO: LAURA SONNENMARK
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He worked there for
seven years. In 2013, Mr. Rutland-Brown began running National
Justice for Our Neighbors, an umbrella group established in 1999 by
the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the church’s international-aid arm.
The church has a long history of helping immigrants and urges its adherents to
“build bridges with migrants in their local communities” and “welcome newly
arriving migrants.” Mr. Rutland-Brown didn’t become a minister, but, he says,
“I’m able to live out my faith by supporting others, by welcoming the
stranger.”
Based in Springfield,
Va., near Washington, D.C., National Justice for Our Neighbors supports a
network of United Methodist Church-affiliated sites running legal clinics in 10
states, including Just Neighbors, whose grass-roots success “was the genesis”
for the larger effort, Mr. Rutland-Brown says. The network does advocacy work
and holds seminars to educate immigrants, including those in detention, about
their legal rights. “We help serve as many low-income clients as possible in
compassionate ways,” says Mr. Rutland-Brown, 38. “Our emphasis is on those who
are the most vulnerable with the fewest resources.”
This year, the network
has helped clients from 108 countries, including Syria, South Sudan, Guatemala
and, most often, Mexico. Between January and September, its 15 sites handled
8,944 cases, Mr. Rutland-Brown says. “Our least challenging problem is how to
find clients,” he adds.
The network’s 37 staff
attorneys and hundreds of volunteers—including other lawyers, retirees and
people between jobs—specialize in handling cases for immigrants seeking work
authorization, asylum or green cards, as well as for unaccompanied minors and
undocumented migrants who have become eligible for “U” visas because they were
victims of violent crimes and are willing to help law enforcement. This year
alone, the network says, it assisted 386 clients with green-card applications
and helped another 174 gain citizenship.
The sites often work
in partnership with social-service providers and school systems, which help
identify clients. A mobile legal clinic in Florida helps immigrants in remote
communities, especially farmworkers and minors.
In 2014, 1.3 million
people immigrated to the U.S., legally and illegally. America remains the
world’s leading resettlement country for refugees, a small immigrant subset,
according to the U.N. American immigration law is notoriously complex: “I am
told it beats the tax code,” Eduardo Aguirre, then the director of
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, testified at a House hearing in
2006.
Cases can drag on for
years; immigrants can be vulnerable to fraud from people posing as lawyers. The
network works to protect immigrants. “It’s never a matter of circumventing the
law,” says Mr. Rutland-Brown. “It’s a matter of accessing it.”