Brandon Fitzsimmons, who serves as the Program Manager for IJP, acknowledges the hardships faced by immigrants who come to this country. He says, “There is a sacrifice taking place on the side of the client, because they are leaving their homeland, the place where they were born and have their earliest memories and deepest cultural sensibilities.” Considering the hardships faced by immigrants helps to spur on their work, day by day. Rachel adds, “I like to remind people of how hard working immigrants are—that they are not taking advantage of our system. They’re not criminals; they’re not rapists; they’re not horrible people. They’re just trying to make a better life for themselves.”

Rachel VanTyle, the lead staff attorney for RAD, adds that mass volunteer events like this are important for the community and for efficiency’s sake. She says, “What it would take me 4 months to do, we can do in 8 hours with this many volunteers.” Such days also give the Clinic the opportunity to provide services for which we might lack funding. Rachel explains that each application, if completed by a paid attorney, would cost roughly $500 per client. Therefore, by relying on volunteers to help so many people at once, the Clinic is able to provide more than $25,000 worth of services that might otherwise be impossible.

Carlton says, “It used to be, back in the past—1800s, 1700s—people committed crimes because there was something inherently flawed in them—that was the thought. And that’s still the mindset: you are a deviant because that is what you are.” Carlton is quick to point out, however, that most of the people he sees made a mistake when they were young. And yet a crime committed 20 years earlier might prevent them from finding sufficient employment even into their middle age. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not making any money. Not making any money, you can’t pay your child support. Can’t pay your child support, you can’t have your license … so your livelihood just goes, ‘Boom!’” Carlton makes an exploding gesture with his hands. “You can’t pay your bills, and then you’re in a position where bankruptcy is an option.”

For 25 years, Deetta Steinmetz worked as an attorney in adversarial divorce litigation. The cases were plentiful; the money was great. But Deetta just couldn’t do it anymore. She was tired of being part of a process that she felt meant one person winning at another’s expense. She says, “How do you win a Family Law adversarial proceeding? It’s by making the other person look bad.”

Such upsetting cases can be difficult to see everyday, so Patti and the rest of the VJP staff try to remember the higher purpose behind their work. Patti says, “This population is what I would consider the most vulnerable, especially the immigrants and human trafficking victims. So just knowing that we’re called to help the vulnerable, I would say that really, when it’s hard, you just reflect on that. These are the people who need help the most.”

The collapse of the economy, especially hard-hitting in Midwestern cities, ushered in the foreclosure crisis, which in turn caused the vacant housing problem we now face. Those who received foreclosure papers sometimes abandoned their home. If the bank failed to take the title, the house eventually went to tax sale, and if no one purchased it, the house ended up on the city’s surplus list. And this happened again and again, thousands of times over, until whole neighborhoods became ghost towns. Matt says, “There were some blocks I would go on where there was maybe only one house that somebody was living in. It was like a war zone.”