CLINIC sat down with Alison Brown, who serves as the associate director of immigration legal services as part of MRS at Catholic Charities in Cleveland, Ohio. Ms. Brown is a former immigration judge and has been working in immigration law for 30 years.

Tell me the basics: Who are you, and what you do?

My name is Alison Brown, and I have been an immigration lawyer for 30 years. I went to law school at the University of North Carolina. I graduated from UNC Law in 1995. I worked at various nonprofit organizations providing free immigration legal services for many years and then became an immigration judge (IJ) for the Cleveland immigration court in April 2010. I left my position as an IJ in December 2019.

After a period of being self-employed writing appeal briefs, then working briefly at USCRI, in July 2025 I became the associate director of immigration legal services at Catholic Charities in Cleveland. Our ILS team consists of 20 employees, including 8 lawyers, 3 accredited representatives and a lot of awesome support staff.

I have now lived in Ohio for 15 years. I have two children, one dog and two cats.

Can you tell me about your journey with immigration law? What inspired you to do the work originally?

My undergraduate degrees were in political science and Russian studies. I traveled to the Soviet Union during undergrad. My first semi-professional internship in undergrad was with a refugee resettlement agency in North Carolina, doing such as home set ups, airport pickups, and working with churches.

When I graduated from undergrad, I thought I wanted to work somewhere like the United Nations and even said as much during a graduation speech. I went overseas and traveled for about 9 months - primarily in Eastern Europe. This was 1990/1991, so much was changing there. Everyone wanted to know how to get to the United States and I could not understand why that was such a dream of so many and why it was so hard. I was 21 years old at the time. When I returned to the United States, I decided to go to law school and work on human rights issues, which ultimately lead me to doing work on asylum cases. I preferred the more hands on helping people work to studying international treaties.

I was an active member of the National Immigration Project in law school and worked on projects such as a trip to Miami to assist Haitian asylum seekers.  Ultimately, I was inspired to continue in immigration law because obtaining/securing legal status for immigrants was, and still is, a critical step for their future.  

How does your prior work as a judge influence your current job/role?

Having been an advocate for immigrants for 15 years, when I took the IJ job, many friends told me I would be miserable having to order people deported. While there are a handful of exceptions, very few cases bothered me or made me feel exceptionally bad because I knew I was fair and I listened with empathy. There were many, many respondents that came before me with sad stories, and I could not grant any type of relief due to restrictions in the law.  

This continues to influence my work because I accept that we are bound by the parameters of the law even if we don't like or agree with the laws and policies. No matter how much we might like our clients or feel for their families, we can only do what we can do. As a young attorney I remember at times getting too emotionally invested in cases and upset when I couldn't help. As an IJ, sometimes even people whom I ordered deported would come up and thank me after the hearing, and I wondered why. Later private attorneys would tell me it was because I listened and showed that I care.

While we need to feel strongly about the importance of our work, getting too emotionally invested or not being realistic, will burn out any immigration attorney, resulting in us not being able to help anyone. While I of course care about all of our clients, our job is to do the best we can given the facts of the case and the current state of the law.  Sometimes that leads to heartbreaking results. Many of the lawyers in our organization are new to immigration law, and I always tell them we have to see the limits of the law and the big picture. We do the best we can for people with the system we have.

What do you see as the value of the CLINIC network, and how have in interacted with CLINIC before?

I see a great deal of value in the CLINIC network. I worked with CLINIC when I was an attorney with Justice For Our Neighbors in Nebraska/Iowa. I worked a great deal with former CLINIC employee Susan Schreiber many years ago on both training and many other issues.

I have more recently worked with CLINIC in the trainings they offer, specifically for those seeking to go from Partial to Full DOJ accreditation. I have helped them as the designated IJ trainer for that last 2 years and am doing it again in February 2026.

I see CLINIC as important for two particular reasons. One, I see how our attorneys go to CLINIC frequently for a second opinion or advice on a certain area of law they just don’t have time to be an expert in. Law is so complex, always changing, and CLINIC is a great resource as there are experts in lots of subject areas to help.

Second, there are many times our advocates get frustrated with systemic issues and feel alone in fighting for better policy. They know that CLINIC is there to help take on the bigger picture efforts and help them navigate failures in the system.

Do you have any advice for CLINIC Affiliates and/or legal services providers at this moment?

Keep fighting the good fight. Take care of yourselves.

Immigration law is a roller coaster, and things change faster than we anticipate. Over the years I have come to have the attitude, “This too shall pass,” as I see policies come and go.

We’re in a tough time, the toughest time I’ve seen so far in my career. I wouldn’t have predicted it would have gotten this bad, but we are where we are. In this climate, we have to remember to take care of ourselves, otherwise we can’t keep listening and caring for our clients.