Dear friends,
Imagine your home being surrounded by dozens of armed ICE agents. Your family is separated in an instant, and you don’t know where to turn. You feel helpless, scared, overwhelmed, and unsure of your legal rights.
As we are all witnessing through news and social media coverage, aggressive ICE enforcement activity has become a daily reality in our state. This year alone, over 100 people have already been detained across Vermont – and each of them requires urgent legal assistance.
In these harrowing situations, early access to immigration counsel can make all the difference: helping people understand their rights and options, file the right paperwork, and secure legal status before it becomes an emergency.
The problem is simple: there aren’t enough immigration attorneys in Vermont, and we need your help to close that gap.
To respond to this crisis, Vermont Legal Aid (VLA) and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project (VAAP) created the Community Lawyering Project – an upstream, community-based model that embeds legal services in trusted local organizations where immigrants already seek support.
