July 31, 2008 10:49 AM
The CARECEN25 series is a memoir by Pat Young of the early years of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island.
In November 1983, I started working at CARECEN as a law student intern. I was in my second year at Hofstra Law School, where I now teach.
CARECEN was based, or should I say CARECEN was "basemented" at the priest's residence next to St. Brigid's Church in Westbury. Fred Schaefer, the pastor, had turned his house into a sanctuary for war refugees from Central America. He offered to let CARECEN use some crowded underground space beneath the sprawling Norman Gothic building.
Some Salvadoran refugees in Washington had founded the first CARECEN the year before. A lawyer from New York had spent his summer volunteering with them. When he returned home he looked for a place to establish a similar office here.
A small group of volunteers, shocked by the violence in Central America, formed a core group around the lawyer, Jose Azar. These early volunteers included Maureen McClosky, and Ken Lederer, who would become the organization's first paralegals, as well as human rights activist Guillermo Chacon and future fundraiser Chris Gray.
There were already a half-dozen organizations on Long Island focused on the human rights crisis in Central America, but CARECEN was unique. It was the only group providing direct legal services to Central American refugees, advocating for changes in the immigration laws, and using the stories of the refugee experience to influence the thinking of Long Islanders. CARECEN also helped devise legal strategies that challenged the Immigration and Naturalization Service's wholesale denial of political asylum to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.
From the start, we were to have a professional staff of lawyers, four of whom later went on to positions as full-time law school professors, and a cadre of carefully trained paralegals.
Our clients were almost all refugees from the killing fields of El Salvador and Guatemala, places where whole families were wiped out when a father joined a union, or a mother participated in a Catholic organization.
When they fled to the United States, instead of being met by a refugee aid worker, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were arrested by unsympathetic men with guns, imprisoned with felons, and mocked by their jailers if they tried to assert their rights.
We hoped to offer them some legal balm, but first we would have to fight to change the law.
Here are other articles in this series tracing the early years of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island:
CARECEN's 25th Anniversary
Teaching English/Learning about immigration
In the beginning