Las Abogadas

The movie and Q&A will take place in person at the Cephas House in San Marcos.  Texas State students and faculty who wish to view the film online can do so through Kanopy.   

For a group of extraordinary women who practice immigration law, the refugee crisis is a call to action they can’t ignore.

Las Abogadas follows four immigration attorneys over a multi-year odyssey as the U.S. government under President Trump upends every law meant to protect those fleeing from persecution, violence and war.  From setting up a legal clinic in a Volkswagen bus in the middle of five thousand desperate migrants, to persuading border guards to follow the law and accept a blind woman into U.S. custody, to crossing the border to counsel African migrants stuck in Tijuana, to giving legal advice in the brutally hot Mexican sun to families desperate to see American soil—we watch our characters’ surreal journeys to try and help.

Charlene D’Cruz has been practicing immigration law since the late 1980s. In 1989 she helped found the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project in Florence, Arizona.  In 2019, she founded Project Corazon Matamoros, providing free legal services to refugees stuck in Matamoros and Reynosa during MPP.  In 2018, she traveled with the caravan of Central Americans from Queretaro to Irapuato, Mexico, providing free legal services and advice to refugees in the caravan. During family separation she traveled to Guatemala to help find parents who were separated from their children by the Trump administration.  She has worked with unaccompanied minors both in the US and in Greece. In 2021 and 2022, she reunited more than 200 unaccompanied children with their parents at the border in Texas, which resulted in them not being jailed or suffering trauma through the ORR system.  She successfully sought humanitarian parole for over 100 refugees with disabilities during the Trump administration. From 2021 to 2023, she created systems through cooperation with the CBP and various Mexican and US nonprofits to facilitate humanitarian parole for thousands of refugees who were stuck in Mexico from 2019 to 2023.

She loves the outdoors and has also run several marathons — barefoot.