Monday October 20, 2008

This past Friday, October 17, our University of Detroit Mercy School of Law Immigration Clinic teamed up with the federal government to host here at the School a naturalization ceremony for 29 new American citizens.

While the ceremony was not for clients of our clinics, it reminded me of the important work that our Immigration Clinic performs. The students in our Immigration Clinic, under the innovative leadership of Prof. David Koelsch, spend many hours representing refugees seeking asylum. The stories that these refugees tell are truly heart-rending: political persecution, religious persecution, jail, violence, torture – and much more. And the experience that our students receive in helping them is both great for our students and truly life-changing for the refugees.

The importance of that representation was driven home to me by this ceremony in which more than two dozen immigrants, each I am sure with a different story, embarked on a new stage in their lives. I must admit that I was very moved participating in this ceremony. As I welcomed the about-to-become Americans to our School, I told them about how looking in their faces, I felt like I was seeing the face of my mother when she became a citizen after having fled persecution in Nazi Germany.

It turns out that that was a common sentiment for all the officials. Mick Dedvukaj, the District Director at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, spoke to these immigrants about his own story, being born in Albania and coming to the United States as a small child. And the presiding judge, Hon. Mona Majzoub, United States Magistrate, Eastern District of Michigan, related the story of her own parents’ emigration from Lebanon to the United States.

Particularly moving was the moment when the oath of citizenship was administered, as these new citizens renounced their loyalty to any “foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty” and pledged their loyalty to the United States of America. Their pride, their commitment, their pleasure was truly inexpressible. And they reminded all of us in the room who were born as American citizens, just how lucky we were at the moment of our birth.

I certainly hope that we at UDM School of Law will host more of these ceremonies. And I look forward to the day when we can host a ceremony comprised entirely of immigrants helped by UDM students in our Immigration Clinic!