Alone Across the Border
Stephen P. Hall JD ’10
Stephen P. Hall JD ’10 is a litigation attorney at Holland & Knight in Boston. He is the immediate past president of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association and serves as a trustee for the Boston Bar Foundation. This year he was honored with the 40 Under 40 Award from the National Bar Association and the Boston Business Journal. He also received the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Development Pro Bono Award. We asked him about his current pro bono efforts.
Hall: I’m wrapping up a case for Kids in Need of Defense. It’s an organization that helps minors who cross the U.S. border unaccompanied by an adult. My client is a native of Honduras, and he arrived in the U.S. severely undernourished. His mother and brother were already here, and the brother is an American citizen. My client used a coyotaje [smuggler] to travel through Honduras and Mexico to try to reunite with his family and was left alone just across the border. I worked with his mother to get her custody through the probate court, and now I’m working on a petition to change his immigration status so that he can stay under the Special Immigrant Juvenile program.
