This is the registration option for IN-PERSON attendance at the July 16 session, which takes place at the Lebanon Opera House, Lebanon, NH. This event is open seating; your ticket will not correspond to an assigned seat.

The Broken Promise of America’s Asylum System

Rachel Rosenbloom, Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law

When Senator Edward Kennedy sponsored the Refugee Act of 1980, he urged his congressional colleagues to pass a bill that would “welcome homeless refugees to our shores” and “give statutory meaning to our national commitment to human rights and humanitarian concerns.” The Refugee Act has transformed the United States over the past 45 years. However, the U.S. refugee and asylum system has never entirely lived up to the lofty goals that Senator Kennedy articulated, and the federal government now appears to be abandoning them entirely. In this lecture, Professor Rosenbloom will assess both the achievements of the Refugee Act and its shortcomings, and examine how immigrant communities are organizing to demand a better future.

Rachel Rosenbloom is Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where she teaches courses on immigration law, refugee and asylum law, and administrative law. From 2017 to 2020, she was the Co-Director of the Northeastern University Immigrant Justice Clinic. Her scholarship has focused on the immigration enforcement system, the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, and debates over American birthright citizenship since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern, Professor Rosenbloom was a Human Rights Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where she served as the supervising attorney for the Center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. She has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cadiz and at the Center for Race and Gender at U.C.-Berkeley.