We're proud to share that our own Attorney Brittany Faith was recently featured on Think Immigration, the blog of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Attorney Faith's piece, “What Would Dolly Do? Carrying Her Compassion into Immigration Advocacy,” honors Dolly's legacy of compassion, dignity, and generosity, and asks what that legacy still has to teach immigration advocates today.
A Song That Restored People's Names
Attorney Faith writes about discovering that Dolly Parton recorded Woody Guthrie's “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” in 1980, a song written after a 1948 plane crash that killed 32 people, including 28 Mexican farmworkers whom news reports identified only as “deportees,” never by name. Guthrie wrote the song so those workers would be remembered as people, not labels.
Dolly's decision to include it on an album about the American workforce affirmed something immigration advocates know well: immigrant workers are workers, and immigrant families are families.
As Attorney Faith puts it: “The lesson of Deportee is not simply that labels can wound. It is that names matter, stories matter, and remembrance matters. … This person is more than a file. This family is more than a statistic. This worker is more than the labor others benefit from.”
That belief, that every client is more than a case number, is at the center of how we practice immigration law at Abbott, Weiss, Faith & Darnell. We see it in the families we represent and the cases we carry, and we're grateful Attorney Faith put it into words so many in our field needed to read.
Read Attorney Brittany Faith's full piece on AILA's Think Immigration blog.
Contact us at (423) 264-2206 to schedule a professional evaluation of your case and keep your immigration journey on track.