Elise Harriger is fighting a cold and fatigue as she sits across from me at a Salvadoran restaurant in East Austin. “I’m too old for this,” Harriger says, reaching for one of the half dozen different multivitamins on the table. “I might not be an immigration attorney in a year. I might be working at a cafe or living in Nepal.”
For the past hour, we’ve been talking about how the Trump administration has affected her work directing the legal clinic at Casa Marianella, an Austin immigrant shelter where Harriger and her legal partner assist over 500 people a year. Since sweeping immigration reforms went into effect in 2017, Harriger has grown used to losing more often than not—a feeling shared by immigration lawyers across the United States. Policies like the Remain in Mexico program, which has left almost 60,000 asylum seekers stranded in dangerous border towns, have essentially eliminated asylum at the southern border; lawyers also face a so-called “invisible wall”—delayed processing for visas and a court backlog of one million cases.
