Open your eyes and go north

Clarissa Kalil still remembers the verse. A teenager in Brazil, wrestling with whether to study in the United States or remain close to home, she opened her Bible and found a line she took as a directive: open your eyes and go to the North. It felt like a promise and a command. She was American by birth but raised abroad, a daughter in a long line of lawyers with a father who said the move was too dangerous and too lonely. So she stayed. She studied. And then life nearly ended.

In law school at 16, she was rushed to the ICU and placed on machines. She slipped into a coma and, as she tells it, bargained for one thing. If I live, let me live my American dream. She did live. She graduated. She passed the notoriously grueling Brazilian bar at 21. At 22 she landed in the United States with a couple hundred dollars, limited English, and a goal that bordered on impossible.

The years that followed did not soften her. They sharpened her. She cleaned houses, babysat, hosted in restaurants. She learned the language well enough to earn a place in law school. She enrolled while raising a one year old and pregnant with a second. When she called Northeastern’s LLM director to withdraw, he told her not to give up and promised help. She took him at his word. On the day her contractions began, she was in the university parking garage. She drove herself to the hospital, delivered without medication so she could heal faster, and returned to class three weeks later. She studied with a baby on one arm and a book in the other.

Kalil’s choice of field is not academic. It is intimate. Her parents lived undocumented in the United States for a time, and when her mother survived an assault that could have qualified her for a U visa, no one told them about that relief. The family left. Clarissa’s trajectory bent around that loss. She wanted to be the advocate her family never had.

Her practice grew into a refuge for people in crisis, and at a historic moment it became a lifeline. During the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, she helped resettle more than 300 families. They were soldiers who had fought beside Americans, doctors, and women who had never been allowed to learn to read. The government created a pathway that moved cases quickly, and Kalil went with the tide, sometimes in the USCIS federal building twice a day for interviews. She hired an associate and they handled up to eight interviews a day between them. The wins became tangible in a way that paperwork rarely is. Legal status turned into the right to live, to work, to be safe. You cannot always see freedom, she says. Here, you can.

If that chapter reads like a surge of possibility, Kalil’s current chapter is a portrait of strain. She describes a climate in which people seek legal remedies and fear arrest at the very places designed to process those remedies. She has watched clients avoid driving, avoid going out, turn their homes into private prisons. She recounts secondhand reports of arrests at USCIS biometrics appointments and even an instance in which a lawful permanent resident was detained after spending extended time abroad to care for a dying grandmother. The woman accepted voluntary departure in immigration court out of desperation to escape detention and, Kalil says, remained held for months.

The stakes are legal, and they are also deeply human. Kalil worries about victims of human trafficking who seek T visas. The law allows for waivers of many immigration violations, including removal orders, so that survivors can help law enforcement investigate crimes. Yet fear now shadows the very process that is meant to protect them. Most Americans live in a bubble, she says gently, not as an indictment but as an explanation. Without papers, people become targets for labor and sex trafficking. Her caseload is full of survivors.

In the Brazilian community where she works, she also battles a wave of unlicensed practitioners who file applications that carry hidden risks. Someone with an old removal order who walks into a USCIS interview may be a red flag. Even those who entered under the visa waiver program decades ago face a unique trap. If they overstay and are detained, they cannot see an immigration judge. Kalil prepares federal habeas petitions and APA lawsuits, sharpening a litigation toolkit that many immigration lawyers now need. This is where the fight is, she says. In federal court, on the record, pressing the government to follow the laws it already has.

Her cases are not abstractions. They are mornings spent calling detention centers that do not answer, afternoons tracking a client who is transferred across state lines without notice, evenings drafting a bond motion without the chance to speak to the person it is meant to free. She describes a week where she learned after days of silence that a client had been moved to New Mexico, then ran into a new wall trying to schedule an attorney call.

Even success has a cost. During the Afghan surge, Kalil handled two interviews a day for a year while her marriage ended and her home was sold. She and her children lived in a hotel while she helped other families find permanence. The echo was not lost on her. My clients were displaced. So were we.