The new opera ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts is inspired by one family’s story of separation at the Mexico-U.S. border. This panel considered the particular experiences and conditions under which children migrate to the Mexico-U.S. border as well as the ongoing legal challenges caused by the forced separation of families seeking asylum. Georgetown University Professor Katharine Donato, director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration, was joined by Sergio García, federal public defense attorney from the Western District of El Paso, Texas, and Christie Turner-Herbas, attorney and director of special programs at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). The conversation was moderated by Amelia Espinosa, a master’s degree candidate in the Center for Latin American Studies.
Featuring
Katharine Donato is the Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration and director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has examined many research questions related to migration, including the economic consequences of U.S. immigration policy; health consequences of migration; immigrant parent involvement in schools in New York, Chicago, and Nashville; deportation and its effects for immigrants; the great recession and its consequences for Mexican workers; the U.S. legal visa system; and refugee and migrant integration. She is the author of Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present (2015, with Donna Gabaccia) and Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts (2019, with Elizabeth Ferris). Donato has also co-edited 8 refereed journal issues and published more than 90 refereed journal articles and book chapters.
Sergio García is an assistant federal public defender for the Western District of Texas in El Paso. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and then his J.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington. After law school, García clerked for a number of federal judges in the country, including the Ninth and Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. After clerking, he served as a special assistant United States attorney for the District of Colorado. García was born and raised in Mexico City, and his proudest moment is when he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Christie Turner-Herbas is an immigration law expert with over 10 years in the field. Turner-Herbas oversees KIND’s family separation work nationwide, as well as KIND’s legal programming along the U.S.-Mexico border. Turner-Herbas previously served as deputy director of legal services, helping manage KIND’s East Coast field offices. Turner-Herbas also served as the managing attorney for KIND’s Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia field offices. Prior to joining KIND, she was a supervising attorney at Catholic Charities’ Hogar Immigrant Services in Virginia, where her work included deportation defense and family-based immigration matters. A 2008 honors graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, Turner-Herbas was a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center and interned at several immigrant rights organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Catholic Charities of Washington, DC, and American Gateways in Austin, Texas.
Amelia Espinosa (moderator) is a second-year M.A. candidate in the Latin American Studies Program at Georgetown University and a graduate research intern at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.