Lisa Brodyaga, the leading defender of refugees’ rights in U.S. courts for the past 40 years, died Thursday at her home, the Refugio del Río Grande, near San Benito, Texas. She was 81. Her death was confirmed by her longtime friend, Pio Celestino.
An attorney of fierce determination, yet a farm girl at heart, Brodyaga founded the first pro bono law office to represent refugees in U.S. immigration prisons. Her death was universally mourned by defenders of refugees’ and immigrants’ rights.
“That’s terrible news. I’m so sorry for Lisa and for the countless people she has helped over decades of selfless advocacy,” said Carlos César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University College of Law, and author of “Crimmigration,” a legal textbook and blog.
“There are few people as committed and ferocious as Lisa Brodyaga,” García Hernández said, upon learning she was in hospice. “Whether we know her name or not, immigration lawyers across the United States walk in her shadow and benefit from her creative, brilliant litigation.”
Lisa founded Proyecto Libertad in 1981, to represent refugees imprisoned at the blandly named Bayview Service and Processing Center, the enormous immigration prison outside Los Fresnos, Texas, commonly known as the corralón, or big corral.
“Lisa was loved by all: prisoners and peasants,” said Patrick Hughes, who worked with her in Proyecto’s early days, and for years thereafter, including in El Salvador’s notorious Mariona prison, where thousands of students, political opponents and suspected guerrillas were detained, tortured and murdered in the 1980s, under a series of U.S.-backed Salvadoran governments.
Hughes helped Lisa establish Proyecto Libertad even before he got out of law school.
“Lisa was co-counsel in the U.S. v Jack Elder case, a criminal trial in Houston in 1984 that exonerated the Catholic activists involved in providing comfort and shelter to refugees,” Hughes told Courthouse News.
He continued: “Lisa Brodyaga was the intellectual author of the Salvadoran asylum movement in the 1980s [the Sanctuary Movement]. She was invited to El Salvador in 1986 to work with the leftist FMLN movement and she spent many months there interviewing political prisoners and assisting in the effort to document the torture suffered by Salvadorans who resisted the Reagan-Bush supported regimes of Napoleon Duarte and Alfredo Cristiani 1984-1994.
“Lisa was the director of a legal project that gave legal help to more than 7,000 Central Americans from 1981 to 1985, when the American Bar Association finally came to her aid and began to fund the effort to stop the deportation of Central Americans.”
Proyecto Libertad represented more than 6,000 Salvadorans, Guatemalans and other refugees in immigration courts under the Reagan administration before even one was granted asylum. (Author’s records: See below.)
Carlos Holguín, general counsel for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles, told Courthouse News: “I first met Lisa in 1981 when we were putting together the litigation that became Orantes-Hernandez v. Smith. Lisa’s office was a beehive of activity, with her in the middle.”
The Orantes-Hernandez v. Smith federal class action, (which became Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese and Orantes-Hernandez v. Thornburgh,) overturned more judicial rulings than any other lawsuit in U.S. history.
It challenged immigration judges’ summary denial of political asylum to more than 100,000 Salvadoran and Guatemalan refuge-seekers, fleeing repressive and murderous governments friendly to the United States, while judges summarily granted asylum to tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, fleeing a government against which the United States was making war. The final ruling was issued in 1991.
“I don’t think I’ve ever known a lawyer with more energy and drive to fight the good fight,” Holguín said. “In the years since, Lisa’s reputation as a courageous and tireless advocate for immigrants and refugees has only grown. She has consistently been the go-to federal litigator for immigrants and refugees in the Rio Grande Valley.
