Immigrant Rights Fellow 2021-23

PHIL TORREY: My name is Phil Torrey, and I'm the Immigration and Refugee Fellow with RPL. And I'm here to talk to you about my burning question, which is, what value am I adding to a particular space? It's a question that I think about any time I'm in a new space talking with new people, working on a new project.  

And typically, my answer is one of two things. Either first, I'm operating as a lawyer in that space. I'm representing an individual who has been marginalized by our criminal law enforcement systems as well as our immigration enforcement systems. I'm working with that person to ensure that their voice and that their humanity is represented in a system that's designed to strip that humanity away from them.  

For example, I've recently represented an individual and her family who spent over four years in sanctuary. I had to get to know them, to learn them, to develop trust and rapport with them in order to authentically convey their story to a legal system that, again, is designed to ensure that their story is not made.  

The other answer is, I'm typically operating in a space as a teacher. At Harvard Law School, I directed a clinic called the Immigration Clinic. In that space, I worked with students and I supervised them on cases like the sanctuary case I just mentioned. And to teach them about how these systems have been designed to dehumanize.  

But what I've learned in my time in RPL is that the answer to my burning question, and the way that I've been thinking about it, is too simplistic. And so, what I've done is think more about the answer to that question through a religious literacy lens.  

I've thought more about what my situation is in a particular space, what other individual's situation is in a particular space, how we collectively are thinking about issues of fairness, justice, prosperity. What does just peace look like for all of us within that space? How can I help advance that notion of just peace there? How can I understand when to step back and to not take up space?  

All of these questions are now my burning questions. So my burning question has gone from one to several. But all of this, I have learned from my colleagues, from my students, from the faculty and staff here at the Divinity School, and I so much appreciate it and feel like my teaching as well as my lawyering has been better informed by it.