Reaching out to lift up others — volunteer interpreters supporting Vecina

Join us for our first general meeting of 2023! Our speakers will be Molly Chew, Project Director for Vecina, and Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an attorney at Lincoln-Goldfinch Law.

Molly Chew is the Project Director at VECINA, a nonprofit organization that focuses on empowering immigrant justice advocates by mentoring attorneys, educating communities, and mobilizing volunteers. At VECINA, Molly manages several pro bono projects that focus on a range of immigration issues, from the detention of unaccompanied refugee children, to defensive asylum for Latin American refugees, to affirmative asylum for Afghans fleeing the persecution of the Taliban. Molly has spent nearly a decade working with unaccompanied refugee children and their families from around the globe, including seven years in Office of Refugee Resettlement contracted programs. Additionally, Molly has spent time at the border in Mexico working with asylum seekers and spent a year with a New York-based legal aid organization that served individuals who were seeking trafficking visas or asylum after having been persecuted on account of their gender identity. Molly is U.S. Department of Justice Accredited Representative and is obtaining her Master’s Degree in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies from the University of London. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Molly’s presentation to the members of AATIA will focus on the work of VECINA’s ReUnite project, which helps family members and other loved ones seeking the release of detained unaccompanied immigrant children. Molly will discuss the crucial role that volunteer interpreters play in these cases, as well as the cases of asylum seekers.

Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch wanted to work in the field of social justice when she started law school at the University of Texas. She knew she would be able to help in the Immigration Clinic because Kate speaks Spanish, so she decided to enroll. As a student at the Clinic, her first assignment was to visit the Hutto immigrant detention center. There, she met with a detained family of asylum seekers who had a five-month-old baby girl. She was wearing a onesie issued by the prison.

The baby girl’s mom asked Kate if she would hold the baby during the meeting because she smelled like the outside world, and when Kate got up to leave the meeting, the mother asked Kate if she could sneak the baby girl out with her and take care of her until the baby’s parents could get out. Although Kate couldn’t do that, she did represent the family in their successful asylum case.

The elation Kate felt at helping obtain that family’s release and securing their future coupled with the horror she felt at seeing children in jail made her choice easy: Kate decided to spend her career fighting for justice and dignity for immigrants.

Upon graduating from the University of Texas for college and law school, Kate received an Equal Justice Works Fellowship in 2008, completed at American Gateways.

Kate will speak about the immigration-related work she does at Lincoln-Goldfinch and describe her experience working with interpreters, in particular for indigenous languages and Spanish.

The meeting is open to members and non-members. We ask that non-members register ahead of time to receive the link.