Joan Fernandez is a Law and Public Policy Scholar and a Rubin-Presser Social Justice Fellow at Temple University Beasley School of Law. A first-generation and low-income Dominican immigrant, he has always taken a profound interest in his clients’ legal battles.
Before law school, Joan served as a Community Fellow with the Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC), the nation’s first immigration legal fellowship program. The late Honorable Robert A. Katzmann, Former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, created IJC to recruit, train, and populate the immigration field with the highest quality legal advocates. As an IJC fellow, Joan helped spearhead the program’s expansion into Long Island, New York, a region with one of the highest rates of unaccompanied child resettlement nationwide. It also has a corresponding unmet need for direct legal services. Joan then served as a U.S. Department of Justice Fully Accredited Representative with Central American Legal Assistance (CALA), a New York City-based nonprofit organization that provides low-cost and free legal services to asylum seekers. As a Fully Accredited Representative, Joan helped hundreds of asylees obtain permanent residence and reunite with their loved ones after prolonged and forced family separation. In doing so, he helped his clients collectively save about half a million dollars in prohibitively expensive immigration filing fees. He also directly represented asylum seekers in removal proceedings before the New York City Immigration Courts.
Joan graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in History and a Certificate in the Program of Latin American Studies. He is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.
This summer, Joan will be interning with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG), a national nonprofit organization that for fifty years has served as a progressive source of advocacy-oriented legal support on issues critical to immigrants’ rights. He will help NIPNLG provide technical assistance and support to community-based immigrant organizations, legal practitioners, and all advocates seeking and working to advance the rights of noncitizens. Joan hopes to sharpen his legal advocacy skills and to use them to inform humane immigration policy change efforts.