Meet the immigration attorney trying to serve 2,000 asylum-seekers

It often feels like the only certainty in Charlene D’Cruz’s life these days is uncertainty. But there are always ways to maintain some semblance of routine.

This late January morning starts like most others: with a pot of tea brought from her Wisconsin home steeping next to her hotel breakfast. She’s greeting the hotel staff she is now on first-name terms with, wearing a purple T-shirt from her daughter’s college, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her black hair is streaked with gray, and as she pours some of her tea she jokes that she’s become her mother. It’s the calm before the storm.

An immigrant herself who, growing up, never wanted to be a lawyer, she is now decades into a career on the front lines of asylum law. In the past, those front lines have been in Guatemala and Greece.

Today, in a fundamentally transformed U.S. asylum system, it has meant working out of a former dentist’s office in Matamoros, Mexico. There are roughly 2,000 migrants (a specific number is difficult to pin down) in the city. Ms. D’Cruz commutes every morning from Brownsville, Texas. She is one of the only full-time U.S. immigration lawyers working in the city.

“We do have some challenges, but at least being on the ground – I mean, there’s no other way to do this,” she says.

She isn’t representing

Six days a weekEl campamentoShift at the southern borderA new era“Taking its toll”