Showing Up Anyway: The Work of an Immigration Attorney

When Jessica Anleu (’13 J.D.) loses a case, her client is often deported, sometimes as soon as the following day. Her job involves bearing witness to the kind of heartbreak she can’t leave at the office – husbands taken from wives, children from parents, people’s lives completely upended. And she didn’t plan any of it.

Anleu grew up in Phoenix, close to the border, and while not Latina herself, she studied Spanish growing up and was immersed in a bilingual community. She then studied international affairs at Northern Arizona University, without yet realizing how valuable that degree would become later in her career.

“When I went to Gonzaga, immigration law wasn’t even on my radar,” she says. Anleu always loved being around and helping people. She served on the Gonzaga Public Interest Law Project board, led student trips to the Dominican Republic, and jumped at a chance to study abroad in Guatemala between her second and third year. After graduation she landed a position at the Human Rights Ombudsman office in Guatemala City, working in the forced disappearances division. Guatemala’s armed conflict had ended less than two decades earlier, and investigators were still sorting through millions of recovered military records, piecing together the fates of activists who had spoken out and vanished. She spent hours in the archives tracing patterns: movements, orders, absences. She was supposed to stay three months. She stayed nearly a year.

Anleu also met her husband, Mario, a Guatemalan contracts attorney. They spent a year apart before marrying, navigating the immigration system themselves. This means when clients sit across from them, they’re not just talking to lawyers but people who understand the humanity of their situation. Today, they run Zava Immigration Law Group, named for their two daughters, Ava and Zara.

The last year brought enormous changes to the system – overnight policy reversals, protections stripped with no warning, ICE officers appearing at immigration court to arrest clients who had entered the country lawfully. It’s been draining. She and Mario started driving clients to hearings themselves to protect them, but still it wasn’t enough. They began filing writs of habeas corpus to enforce bond hearings courts had already ordered and the government was simply refusing to honor.

“In thirteen years, I had never seen anything like it,” Anleu says.

What keeps her going is the bravery of her clients – people who show up to court knowing they might be detained on the way out, simply because they are going through the system.

Anleu often returns to an old parable about a man throwing starfish back into the ocean. Scores of them have washed up on shore and a passerby remarks that the man can’t possibly save all of them.

“But for that one,” she quotes, “I made all the difference.”

She knows she and Mario can’t save everyone. Families will be separated. Cases will be lost. But they’ll continue to show up anyway – filing the writs, driving clients to court, and trying to make the math work in someone’s favor. Because for that one, it makes all the difference.