ALAS equips youth and educators to remove barriers to education, career, and freedom for and with youth facing immigration and criminal courts.
What We Do
ALAS does 3 things for and with court-impacted youth:
1. Organizes youth in our summer fellowship, Aspire, to pursue internal, interpersonal, and institutional change.
2. Trains educators to support immigrant students by building an attorney pipeline to which educators from partner schools refer their students for pro-bono legal representation, and to support arrested students by writing mitigation letters to judges to advocate for students being held on bail pre-trial.
3. Collectively advocates with our youth and educators in support of changes they want to see in the education, immigration, and criminal-legal systems.
Legal Representation
Mitigation Letters
What We Do
Why We Do It
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Why We Do it
Educational Access
Students deserve educational access. The United States is the mass incarceration capital of the world. Our legal systems become barriers to education for students in both criminal court and immigration proceedings.
An Injustice
In New Orleans alone there are 1,100 student arrests. Those who cannot afford to post bail wait in jail for a minimum of 2 months and a maximum of 2 years before trial. This increases trauma, drop-out rates, and recidivism.
0% Advance
2,400 students in Orleans Parish are English Language Learners. In one Orleans Parish network of high achieving high schools 74% of all graduates continue to post-secondary learning options each year. Because undocumented students do not qualify for in-state tuition rates, 0% have advanced to higher education.
What We Do
Why We Do It
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How We Started
Starting in 2015, together with students, families and community partners, high school teacher and social worker Lisa Maria Rhodes developed a system of support for system impacted youth that were experiencing legal barriers to their education due to immigration or criminal court proceedings.
Over the next 5 years ALAS expanded to 9 more schools, training over 200 teachers in Louisiana. In 2019, ALAS became an official 501c3 non-profit organization.
What We Do
Why We Do It
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The Injustice
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