CUNY Law students are raising money to support refugees they helped obtain special immigration visas before the travel ban went into place. NY1's Clodagh McGowan filed the following report.
Katy Naples-Mitchell, a third-year law student at the CUNY School of Law, recently found herself in the middle of an international case.
Naples-Mitchell works with the school's International Refugee Assistance Project or IRAP. She says an Iraqi client they've worked with to obtain a special immigrant visa was one of the first to arrive into Kennedy Airport, about an hour after President Donald Trump's executive order banning travel from seven Muslim majority countries went into effect.
"So that meant he was put in detention, and he was detained for upwards of 18 hours overnight Friday to Saturday," said Naples-Mitchell.
She says her colleagues got wind of the executive order three days before it went into effect. That's when the midnight phone calls began in order to let their clients know their time to travel was running out.
"They had a span of like a few hours to pack up everything they had, to say goodbye to their families in Iraq and to board flights that we booked for them," said Naples-Mitchell.
Naples-Mitchell says law students paid out of pocket to book plane tickets for their clients. So now, they're raising money to cover the travel expenses, as well as help the newly arrived families get settled.
"These are people who have been targeted and threatened, sometimes with extreme forms of violence. Sometimes, their family members have been killed," said Naples-Mitchell.
For more information about CUNY's IRAP Fundraising efforts, you can head to this link and this link.