This week, I began taking calls from current and prospective migrant workers on the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante phone lines. The office divided the phone responsibility between different staff members and I was assigned to answer all of the calls on Mondays and take over certain intakes or referrals that we received outside of office hours. Over the past year, I did similar work in Washington D.C. with the Washington Lawyers's Committee workers' rights legal clinic and found myself frequently drawing on these past experiences on Monday. Given that people called to ask for support related to serious issues like discrimination, crimes committed against them, and even human trafficking, I was very thankful to have had some prior understanding of how to navigate the calls. I think that it can be easy to answer calls and only listen for the parts of someone's story where you can help or read out a scripted response about filing a complaint for wrongful termination for example. It is an understandable response to fall back on the training and resources you have when facing such an overwhelming situation especially while communicating in a second language, but it limits the amount of human connection you can show in the process of providing legal support. I was very glad to have had the opportunity to shadow one of my co-workers as she answered calls to see how she was able to combine the necessary legal and bureaucratic explanations with empathy and humanity.

I answered roughly twenty calls on Monday, most of which did not necessitate full intakes and were mostly asking basic questions about legal rights or about how to find H-2 visa work in the United States. However, I was challenged with a few calls that required follow-ups with the CDM attorneys. For these calls, I had been trained on what details are most important in order to determine whether someone could potentially take legal action against their employer for a range of issues. I talked through the specifics of each situation with the workers who called and asked them all of the questions to build out a complete report to present to the CDM legal team. The most difficult part of these calls is always informing the worker that there may not be any concrete action that they can take despite the injustices that they faced.

Every Tuesday, the attorneys, paralegals, and staff members who answer the phone lines meet to present the details of the week's intakes and receive advice and next-steps to follow-up with the workers. I presented the three intake reports that I had written on Monday and began reaching back out to workers with the responses I got from the attorneys. This was very exciting for me as each of the three people seemed to have solid cases to begin the processes of holding their employers accountable and even receiving compensation or wages that were stolen from them. 

Aside from speaking on the phone with workers, I spent the week helping one of the attorneys on research for an ongoing case and preparing for a "know your rights and resources" training with an amazing organization called La Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. The organization is a large group of migrant women farm-workers who work across the United States and meet monthly in different subcommittees to organize against issues like labor abuses, sexual assault, and health risks like pesticide use. CDM has a longstanding relationship with the organization and its members and consistently provides legal support however it can. This Thursday, I had the privilege of joining their workers' rights committee meeting and presenting resources about ending child labor. I made an informative slideshow and was given about half an hour to share resources and moderate a dialogue about child labor in the U.S. agricultural industry. It was an incredible experience to hear from the members, and I do not even have the words to describe how impactful it was when a few people bravely shared their own experiences of having to work on farms in the U.S. starting at age twelve or thirteen. Similarly to answering intake calls about serious issues, I was worried that I did not have the perfect response (especially in Spanish) to acknowledge the weight of their experiences and show how grateful I am that they were able to share with me. However, I tried my best and was happy to be able to share a document with further resources and legal support.