Highline professor Bruce Lamb has been awarded the Minoru Yasui Justice Award for his work on behalf of immigrants.
Lamb is a lawyer and coordinator of the Legal Studies program at Highline. He also volunteers with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, representing people who are seeking asylum in the U.S.
Like Lamb, Yasui earned his law degree from the University of Oregon. He fought for the rights of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, when they were interned in camps simply based on their ethnicity, and their civil liberties were greatly restricted.
“He’s the real hero,” Lamb said.
Since graduating from law school, Lamb has volunteered in The Northwest Immigration Rights Project as an attorney, representing immigrants from around the world who are fleeing political persecution and social oppression in their home country and seeking asylum in the U.S., he said. The project trains and connects volunteer attorneys and refugees who can’t afford lawyers.
“For the past 35 years, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has allowed me to serve as a volunteer, representing people from all around the world who have had to flee persecution in their home countries and seek political asylum,” he said.
He has also served in a variety of non-profit organiations, serving immigrant communities and people of color, including Centro de Ayuda Solidario a los Amigos (CASA Latina), Southern Sudanese Community of Washington, International Leadership Academy of Ethiopia (now Lebawi Academy), and Amistad School, as well as consulting on a variety of projects for the immigrant community.
Lamb started teaching at Highline in 2011 in the Legal Studies program. In addition to his law degree, he has a master’s in public administration from the University of Washington. A longtime civil litigation attorney, he is admitted to practice in the federal and state courts of Washington and Oregon, the Ninth Circuit, and in immigration court.
“With the most diverse student body of any college campus in Washington, it allowed me to join the mission of making the legal profession more representative of the broad society it serves,” he said. “Our students are informing and leading our focus on inviting, training and placing BiPOC, LGBTQIA, low income, homeless and first generation college students in the legal profession, thereby improving the profession, and inevitably perhaps, our system of civil and criminal justice.”
Lamb is continuing his volunteer work. He is representing clients in several asylum cases, which can take months to years to resolve.
“Most of the clients are from Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo,” he said.
Asylum seekers have to prove to the US court that they have a well-founded fear of prosecution based on the count of race, religion, particular social group, political opinions, abide by the government, or a group a government can’t control, he said.
“I’m taking more domestic violence cases from Mexico. That’s a new type of case which is more difficult to do,” he said.
Suffering from domestic violence is not enough to earn someone asylum, Lamb said. He said they must demonstrate that the prevailing attitude about domestic violence in the area where they live does not find it wrong, that it won’t be prosecuted, that the victim has both objected to the violence and asserted their right to be free of such treatment, and that their objection has led to further violence.
If they can do all that, “then we have a fighting chance of getting an immigration judge to grant asylum,” Lamb said.