November 19, 2025

Celebrating Victories While Adapting Workflows

View this email in your browser Vermont Asylum Assistance Project is a legal services and technical assistance organization that exists to mentor no-cost and low-cost immigration lawyers and legal workers; educate and serve immigrants and community members; maximize impact across sectors; and advocate to protect immigrants’ rights. Join us: www.vaapvt.org. Donate to VAAP Want to read this newsletter in Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Dari, or Portuguese? Visit www.vaapvt.org/newsletters and select your language in the top right corner. ¿Desea leer este boletín en español, francés, criollo haitiano, dari o portugués? Visite www.vaapvt.org/newsletters y seleccione su idioma en la esquina superior derecha. Quer ler este boletim em espanhol, francês, crioulo haitiano, dari ou português? Visite www.vaapvt.org/newsletters e selecione seu idioma no canto superior direito. Voulez-vous lire ce bulletin en espagnol, français, créole haïtien, dari ou portugais? Visitez www.vaapvt.org/newsletters et choisissez votre langue en haut à droite. Vle li bilten sa a an panyòl, fransè, kreyòl ayisyen, dari oswa pòtigè? Ale sou www.vaapvt.org/newsletters epi chwazi lang ou anlè adwat. آیا می‌خواهید این خبرنامه را به اسپانیایی، فرانسوی، کریول هایتی، دری یا پرتغالی بخوانید؟ به www.vaapvt.org/newsletters بروید و زبان خود را در گوشهٔ بالا سمت راست انتخاب کنید. FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 🍻 Join Us Tonight: Food, Drinks, & Community at The Alchemist As we continue our brief programming pause this month–now extended through the Thanksgiving holiday break, so we can finish a major data migration and security project–we hope you’ll join us for an evening of connection and collective purpose tonight at the Alchemist! Come raise a glass with us to support the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund, expanding legal resources statewide for noncitizens facing detention, deportation, or family separation in Vermont. 📅 TONIGHT, Wednesday, November 19 | 🕕 6:00–8:00 PM 📍 The Alchemist Brewery, 100 Cottage Club Road, Stowe 🎟️ Tickets: $25 at the door 🍽️ Good food, good drink, and community in solidarity.   🌱 Organizational Update: Strategic Pause, Strategic Alignment We’re using this month's programming pause to strengthen our foundation and sharpen strategies. With our newly DOUBLED staffing, our goals are clear: Channel limited resources into high-impact direct services Mobilize and train pro bono attorneys and interpreters statewide Negotiate statewide service partnerships for upstream immigration prevention through acquisition of status Integrate our newly doubled staff into a cohesive, restorative, sustainable team Redistribute program responsibilities across staff service learners, limited-assistance pro bonos, volunteer attorneys, and (soon) mentors and champions Vermont needs a durable, long overdue immigration defense infrastructure capable of surviving—and resisting—this era’s volatility. This pause is part of our long game. We thank you so much for your patience!   📜 Read on for: a big-picture strategy update; snapshots from our recent case victories; highlights in fast-changing asylum law and Vermont’s role in resisting authoritarianism; updates on our detention visits, trainings, and sector-wide partnerships; and a snapshot of our new staff and how to get in touch with us. Because we’re using this time to recalibrate our external programming, note we will not host case rounds next Tuesday morning, nor conduct group-based detention facility visits next week. Next week we will, however, share our updated external programming schedule going forward. In the meantime, please join us TONIGHT at The Alchemist from 6–8 PM in Stowe to build community, raise funds for VILDF, and help us hold the line together. We've got this! Jill Martin Diaz, Esq. Executive Director VAAP director Jill Martin Diaz describes what VAAP staff and volunteers are seeing on the ground at the Vermont Corrections facilities where ICE detains noncitizens. FIELD NOTES FROM VAAP STAFF Courtesy of American Immigration Lawyers Association and CATO Institute ⚖️ Holding the Line in a Shifting Legal Landscape For decades, precedential immigration decisions were rare and stare decisis protected stability. Since Trump’s first term, that foundation has collapsed. The administration is issuing relentless waves of new precedents amidst other policy changes—overturning settled law at breakneck speed and producing a climate of legal whiplash.  This volatility harms real people. Standards narrow overnight, eligibility evaporates without warning, and those in detention bear the brunt. But here is the key: Much of this new doctrine is unlawful — and courts are saying so. Across the country, direct-service defenders like VAAP, together with national impact litigators, are getting these decisions blocked, limited, or reversed through judicial review. In Vermont, our collective habeas work has already forced immigration courts to correct illegal applications of new BIA rules, leading directly to people walking free. This year alone, VAAP has helped to secure the release of multiple detained community members after the District of Vermont ordered immigration courts to revisit misapplied precedent. Immigration Judges are complying. ICE is releasing people who make bond. Most recently, Palestinian asylee Mohammad Rashid was finally released from Northwest State Correctional Facility as covered by VTDigger. Courtesy of NPR's Ximena Bustillo, Anusha Mathur and Rahul Mukherjee 🐎 Building Power: Winning Cases Through Steady Pacing In addition to constricting substantive immigration pathways, the administration is rapidly changing how applications and removal cases are processed, including the introduction of $100 annual fees to keep asylum applications pending, and $700 appeal fees that price low-income immigrants out of review, as an increasingly inexperienced and hostile trial bench takes shape. These economic sanctions are designed to impede legal access based on income and sow chaos through persisting fear. But that’s not how we operate at VAAP. We respond with strategy, not panic: tracking every change in real time; coordinating statewide and nationally; challenging unlawful policies case-by-case in federal court and winning; strengthening the sector with partners like AALV, VAA, and others newly resourced through the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund; and planning deliberately so we remain effective, not reactive.  This moment calls for steadiness and courage, not silence or capitulation out ot fear. Vermont must assert leadership, safeguard community data, reject misguided preemptive compliance, and take a proactive whole-of-government approach to protecting immigrant neighbors. And we will continue to do our part at VAAP—one habeas, one motion, one application at a time. Even as the legal landscape lurches from one abhorrent administrative development to the next, the immigration bar's steady, methodical resistence strategy is working. Since beginning to welcome new staff in August, VAAP has been building capacity, deepening partnerships, and securing real wins for people in detention and in our communities—work that positions Vermont as a meaningful force in immigration defense nationwide.  Since we began staffing up in August, VAAP has worked with partners and volunteers to complete 43 attorney-client consultations in Vermont DOC facilities (NWSCF and CRCF), several leading to limited or full-scope asylum or related representation, habeas filings, and/or bond advocacy. Our recent active caseload includes 62 active removal cases, 27 detained cases with at least limited-scope representation, and 46 non-detained immigration matters. And behind every number is a person and a community: After a habeas petition in the District of Vermont, one community member detained under unlawful application of new Board of Immigration Appeal rules was ordered reconsidered by the immigration court, granted bond, and released to family instead of being transferred out of state by ICE. During a standing facility visit at NWSCF, VAAP's brief screening of a detained person with cognitive, mental, and physical disabilities who had never spoken with a lawyer before became full-scope representation, a strengthened asylum claim, and procedural safeguards to ensure full and fair access to the courts. In multiple cases, even when outcomes are partial, we are building strong records documenting unlawful detention practices and misapplied precedent—records that feed into broader impact efforts by statewide and national partners. Courtesy of Greg Chen, Senior Director of Government Relations, AILA ⛵ Better Together: Changing Tides so All Boats Rise Together VAAP's growing staff has also been steadily building Vermont’s immigration defense capacity beyond our team through both training and public-facing leadership. Weekly attorney case rounds, with 15–20 practitioners each session, have served as a standing space to troubleshoot complex cases, track new precedent, and coordinate statewide strategy. Our Working With Refugees seminar at UVM brings 25–30 students each semester into the work, channeling their skills into detention visits and ongoing case support. At the Vermont Bar Association’s annual meeting, we convened an immigration roundtable with 10 bar leaders presenting and nearly 100 lawyers in attendance—and, over lunch, VAAP was honored with the VBA President’s Award for our detained defense program, to boot. At the same time, we’ve been investing in outreach and volunteer engagement that roots this work in community. VAAP tabled with prospective clients at Migrant Justice’s Torneo de Fútbol, led the Pride Center of Vermont's Pride Parade as a Grand Marshal, and spoken at numerous VILDF events that together raised over $500,000 for whole-of-sector advancement, all while recruiting new detained-defense volunteers and several core operations vendors. We convened a well attended immigration futures panel at the Vermont Human Rights Commission Civil Rights Summit with statewide partners to chart proactive immigration leadership for this legislative session and election year, ensuring Vermont continues to play a meaningful role on the national stage. All of this is deliberate progress toward our FY26 Impact Plan (vaapvt.org/impact): expanding statewide defender capacity deliberately and sustainably; growing the volunteer and attorney corps as well as staff needed to coordinate and support them; deepening detention- and rural-based intake presence; securing key litigation victories; strengthening partnerships with fellow community legal service providers; and building the coordinated, whole-sector infrastructure Vermont needs. This is measurable, visible progress, and proof that proactive and collaborative work is more powerful than competitive zero-sum thinking and fear-based reaction or inaction. PARTNER HIGHLIGHTS DEADLINE EXTENDED! 🚨Calling all VT attorneys: Vermont’s new Nonprofit Legal Hub is building a statewide network to better support nonprofits with the legal tools and guidance they need—and we need input from legal professionals to shape it. Please take (and share!) the brief Nonprofit Legal Hub Attorney Survey so we can design service solutions that truly work for both the legal and nonprofit communities. Thank you so much to the Peace and Justice Center for honoring VAAP on Friday, November 7th with this year’s Ed Everts Award—it’s a profound recognition of the collective work we’ve built together. Please join PJC in celebrating everything we’ve accomplished together and looking ahead to the justice we’ll build in the coming year. Vermont Bar Association members can now stream our September Immigration Roundtable on demand. Huge thanks to our co-panelists for making it such a successful event, and to Josh Diamond for honoring VAAP with the VBA President’s Award alongside Dawn Seibert and Brett Stokes, our steadfast partners. WELCOMING NEW STAFF Devon Ayers (she/her, ella) joined VAAP last month as our inaugural Director of Operations. Devon brings 10 years of advocacy experience at Vermont Legal Aid focused on housing advocacy and civil rights, capstoned by her successful efforts co-organizing a VLA staff vote to join the AFT union last year. She looks forward to supporting the legal team by keeping in-house systems moving smoothly and productively!  Liv Berelson (she/her, ella) joined VAAP in September as contract Intake Strategist, coordinating a new centralized immigration legal intake and referral system for Vermont. A UVM graduate with experience at RAICES, New Sanctuary Coalition, American Friends Service Committee, and Community Asylum Seekers Project in Brattleboro (VAAP's former fiscal sponsor), Liv is thrilled to help close the legal services gap for immigrants in Vermont as part of VAAP’s team. See her work featured in Braiding a New Life here! Bria Yazic (she/her, ella) joined VAAP in September in a Senior Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow role through which she serves as staff attorney and coordinates junior law fellows and pro bono volunteers. Bria was a former Winooski School District educator and recently moved back to Winooski with her family to join VAAP’s growing legal practice. She joined VAAP from the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice in Maryland where she specialized in complex removal defense litigation. You can read more about her IJC fellowship experience here! Catalina Londono (she/her, ella) joined VAAP in September in an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow role through which she'll provide direct representation to noncitizens in Vermont. Catalina is a '25 graduate of Vermont Law and Graduate School who hales from New Jersey but has made Vermont home. Catalina is excited to expand on her previous experience protecting the rights of immigrant workers facing injustice and safeguarding vulnerable undocumented communities' legal access in VT. Read about her 2024 Peggy Browning Fund Fellowship with Migrant Justice here! Maja Klostermann (she/her, ella) joined VAAP in September of 2024 as a volunteer interpreter, and this September joined the staff as Legal Assistant. Maja studied geography and politics and has worked in a variety of progressive organizations in Europe, including various organizations advocating for Latin American immigrant workers in the UK. Maja is thrilled to be deepening her knowledge of the legal system and continuing to advocate for VT's migrant communities. Catch up on Congresswoman Balint's recent ICE oversight visit, for which Maja interpreted, here. 👥 VAAP Staff Roster VAAP is now powered by an incredible staff, including: Liv Berelson — Intake Specialist Leah Brenner, Esq. — Staff Attorney, managing service learning programming Cameron Briggs Ramos — Immigrant Justice Corps Unaccompanied Children Law Fellow Jill Martin Diaz, Esq. — Executive Director, Managing Attorney & Public Advocate Devon Ayers — Director of Operations Maja Klostermann — Contract Legal Assistant Catalina Londoño — Immigrant Justice Corps Katzmann Law Fellow Emma Matters-Wood, Esq. — Immigrant Justice Corps Senior Law Fellow & Staff Attorney, managing detention defense programming Maggie Otto — Contract Legal Assistant Bria Yazic, Esq. — Immigrant Justice Corps Senior Law Fellow & Staff Attorney, managing pro bono programming ...As well as several core operations vendors and volunteers, with more more staff updates coming soon!   📞 How to Contact VAAP Reminder that you can reach us by phone, text, or WhatsApp at:📱 +1 (802) 999-5654 and by email to: 📧 info@vaapvt.org — General inquiries, referrals, partnerships, events 📧 detained@vaapvt.org — New requests for detained legal help 📧 assistant@vaapvt.org — Scheduling 📬 Mailing address: P.O. Box 814, Elmwood Ave, Burlington, VT 05402, Office visits are by appointment only. 🔗 Follow: @VTAsylum and Learn: www.vaapvt.org 🚨 Need legal help for someone in detention? Submit a request here: https://www.vaapvt.org/legal-support.This form sends an alert to detained@vaapvt.org, monitored jointly by VAAP and the Center for Justice Reform Clinic during business hours. ON THE RECORD "The lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition to challenge the legitimacy of Rashid’s detention and went through two bond hearings in immigration court before ultimately obtaining his release on bond. Going into Thursday’s hearing, Rashid said he was optimistic because he trusted his lawyers, but he was still nervous. He cried when the judge granted him bond. Rashid said he hardly slept the night after the hearing.  "'I was like, I’m waiting for the ICE decision to release me,' Rashid said. 'I can’t wait. I want to just be out. It’s America. Like, it’s a dream.'" "'What we have done previously is bring in either computers or cell phones to bring in our own interpretation,' said VAAP staff attorney Emma Matters. 'However, about three weeks ago, we were informed we'd no longer be able to do this.'" "One non-cabinet level Scott appointee, who asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said senior administration officials have taken an unusually close interest in public communications about policies or programs that might draw unwanted federal scrutiny. 'The Scott administration has made it clear we are to keep our heads down,' the appointee told Seven Days. 'This is not a time to resist. This is the politics of appeasement.'  Jill Martin Diaz, executive director with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, said Scott administration officials are seeking to avoid Trump’s ire and have become hypervigilant about terminology, particularly when it comes to people detained by ICE and held in Vermont prisons. Scott administration officials discussed at length how to refer to prison visits by the group’s lawyers, Martin Diaz said, declining to use the term “clinic” to avoid the impression Vermont was doing anything “extra” for immigrants. 'They seem very preoccupied with word choice as part of their strategy to stay below the radar in Bernie Sanders’ Vermont,' Martin Diaz said." "The fund awarded its first grant of $100,000 to the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project in August. That money has already helped the organization — which just hired its first paid staff member early last year — grow from four to 11 people, allowing it to take on a higher caseload, train volunteer attorneys and organize regular visits to meet with immigration detainees in Vermont prisons." "Vermont State Treasurer Mike Pieciak, at a press conference earlier this year, said the decision to hand over Vermonters' data amounts to one of the largest data breaches in state history...Attorney General Charity Clark, at a press conference last year, said the governor's office prevented her from joining a lawsuit that she believes would have prevented the Trump administration from accessing Vermonters' personal data." "'When submitting the request, we knew there was a chance it could be denied – and we do not plan to appeal the decision,' the [Scott administration] statement to NBC5 read in full. 'Moving forward, we’ll explore ways to support rural communities with limited resources and what assistance could look like.' Trump approved major disaster declarations for Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe late Wednesday. He rejected three requests from other states in addition to Vermont, including Maryland's appeal for reconsideration after the state was denied a disaster declaration for May flooding." "Vermont [State House] appears willing to join North Dakota as it seeks to engage the community with solutions through the Office of New Americans. '[Vermont State House] will join roughly half the states in leveraging existing research, growing partnerships, and legislative momentum to secure Vermont’s long-term economic growth through coordinated workforce integration,' [Martin] Diaz said." THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT! 🫂To all our clients, volunteers, pro bono partners, funders, community allies, and statewide collaborators: thank you. VAAP’s impact is only possible because of your trust, generosity, solidarity, and shared determination to defend immigrant communities and strengthen Vermont’s justice ecosystem. We are honored to do this work alongside you. We'll toast you tonight! Donate to VAAP Vermont Asylum Assistance Project  P.O. Box 814, Elmwood Ave, Burlington, VT 05402 802-999-5654 ‖ info@vaapvt.org ‖ www.vaapvt.org Copyright © 2025, Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.