Photo: University of St. Thomas School of Law. Alissa Pollard.
Alissa Pollard, a 2026 graduate of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, has been named an Immigrant Justice Corps Justice Fellow, one of about 30 law graduates selected nationally in 2026, the school said. She will spend the next two years as a staff attorney at The Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis nonprofit that provides free legal services to low-income asylum seekers across the Midwest. Our congratulations to her.
Pollard traces the achievement to her first semester of law school. "I first heard about the IJC fellowship my first semester in the immigration clinic," she said. "I looked into what the program offered, including the mentorship and the priority to place fellows where the need was greatest, and made it a dream goal to apply when I became an eligible 3L." She spent two years as a student practitioner in the law school's Immigration Law Practice Group clinic, assisting clients seeking citizenship and representing them in immigration court, and was named a 2026 Outstanding Clinical Student of the Year by the Clinical Legal Education Association.
Her clinic supervisor, Professor Virgil Wiebe, said the program deliberately gave her the hardest work. "During master calendar hearings at immigration court, we deliberately assigned Alissa to the more challenging cases," he said. "We trusted in her ability to handle them, her ability to quickly understand the complexities of the cases and to properly engage the court and the government attorneys." Pollard, in turn, credited him: "I truly believe I was considered for the fellowship because of all the experiences Professor Wiebe coordinated for us in the clinic."
What the Immigrant Justice Corps is
The Immigrant Justice Corps was launched in 2014 as the idea of the late Judge Robert Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and describes itself as the nation's first fellowship program dedicated to ensuring quality legal counsel for immigrants. Its Justice Fellowship places promising recent law graduates with organizations where they can do the most good, training them to represent immigrants in removal defense, asylum, and other matters. The organization reports that immigrants with its counsel prevail in 93 percent of completed cases, against a far lower rate for those who go without a lawyer, a gap that is the whole reason the program exists.
Why it matters
The University of St. Thomas School of Law is a Catholic law school in downtown Minneapolis whose stated mission is to form lawyers "who lead their communities by serving them." A national immigration fellowship is exactly that mission in practice: it puts a new lawyer directly in front of clients who often face the immigration system alone. For Pollard, it turns a first-semester "dream goal" into a two-year commitment to the people who need counsel most.
For St. Thomas law students
University of St. Thomas students and alumni have complimentary access to LegalAlphabet, where they can search legal jobs and internships worldwide, including the immigration and public-interest roles this fellowship leads into. Visit the St. Thomas Law campus page, browse current openings on the United States legal jobs board, or read more from our Law School News desk.
Sources
This report is based on the announcement published by the University of St. Thomas, with additional background from the Immigrant Justice Corps. Quotations are drawn from the St. Thomas announcement.
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