10 Who Made a Difference: Allegra Love
Founder of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project helps young immigrants and their families
Her fans describe her as a topnotch attorney and advocate — a “cornerstone” in the community. In the last few years, Allegra Love, founder and director of a Santa Febased nonprofit that provides free legal services to immigrant youth and their families, has helped hundreds of young people obtain federal permits to remain living in the U.S., working and studying without fear of deportation.
Since it was founded in 2014, the Santa Fe Dreamers Project has offered a wide range of services, from helping clients obtain green cards, visas and political asylum to assisting those in detention centers and providing professional development aid. It also has held legal clinics throughout Northern New Mexico.
Love even acquired a recreational vehicle so she could reach unauthorized immigrants living in some of the most remote areas of the region.
Love’s work with the Dreamers Project has become increasingly vital this year as President Donald Trump has rolled out harsh immigration policies, including a surge in raids to detain people living in the country illegally. And in early September, Trump announced he would be phasing out the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which offers young immigrants temporary protection from being deported. Congress has until March to make a decision on whether to restart the program.
As many as 8,000 young people in New Mexico are enrolled in the DACA program. They are now living in limbo, hoping advocates like Love can help
convince lawmakers to make the program permanent.
Because of her efforts to help young immigrants and their families, and her compassion for some of the most vulnerable people in Santa Fe and throughout Northern New Mexico, Love has been selected as one of The New Mexican’s 10 Who Made a Difference for 2017.
She is the “real deal,” said Gaile Herling, coordinator of the Santa Fe Public Schools’ Adelante program for homeless students, who has worked with Love. Herling compared Love to civil rights activist Rosa Parks and labor leader Dolores Huerta, saying she “walks her talk.”
Love, a former educator in the school district and Adelante employee, has helped about 300 students obtain a DACA permit, Herling said. “It was really huge what she was able to accomplish for us.”
Love was raised in New Jersey and Wyoming. She attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and then began working for Santa Fe Public Schools as a bilingual teacher in 2005.
As a new teacher in the duallanguage program at the now shuttered Agua Fría Elementary School, Love developed a passion for young immigrants. Many of the children she served were undocumented immigrants or had parents who were unauthorized to live in the U.S. They needed more support.
“I just became interested in how I could be a better advocate and a more sophisticated one,” she said.
Before she founded the Dreamers Project, she went to law school at The University of New Mexico because “I wanted to have the sharpest tools I could have.”
Love and three other attorneys at the Dreamers Project operate on a budget of only about $300,000, all private donations.
Her Dreamer clients, she said, include teachers, nurses, law students, and employees of nonprofit agencies and prominent local organizations such as La Familia Medical Center. Some recently have purchased homes or are receiving medical insurance for the first time.
“Every single one has something to lose because they have built a life relying on this [DACA] protection,” Love said.
Herling said Love doesn’t give up on her clients.
She recalled Love’s work with one young man from Central America who had ridden a freight train nicknamed “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” through Mexico to reach the U.S. As an unaccompanied minor, he was in grave danger of being returned to his family home, where he faced “horrific violence and perhaps death.”
“She totally had his back,” Herling said.
Love recruited numerous lawyers to help her work with people in immigrant detention centers, such as one in Artesia.
“Instead of complaining about conditions, she goes down there and represents people,” Herling said.
Michael Santillanes, director of development for the Dreamers Project, said Love “has been a very important visionary in taking her experience as a public school teacher and identifying the impact on the lives of her students and their families. … Instead of feeling helpless, she went and got a law degree and came up with a unique — and efficient — model to bring legal representation to people in need.”
Unlike legal aid organizations, this model provides direct, free services to people who, Santillanes said, “now have real status to work and stay in the U.S.”
The organization’s needs are even greater today, Santillanes said, adding that the cancellation of DACA forced it to shift gears and refocus on other cases, which are much more expensive.
“DACA we could do for under $500 in legal services,” he said, “but the types of cases we are pursuing now” — such as visas and political asylum — “are in the thousands.”
Fortunately, he said, Love is “very adaptable to what’s happening. But it is a moving target now with the federal administration. We don’t know from day to day what they’re going to do.”