11/10/08--Boston College Law's Post-Deportation Human Rights Project (PDHRP) will receive the Human Rights award from Alternative Chance/ Chanc Alternativ, a New York based organization that works with Haitian deportees. Professor Daniel Kanstroom, project founder and director, will travel to New York to receive the award on behalf of the PDHRP, the center for human rights, and Boston College Law School.

"This award recognizes the increasing impact of our project as well as the great work done by Rachel Rosenbloom, Mary Holper, and many of our students in this challenging, newly-developing legal arena," Kanstroom said.

The Post-Deportation Human Rights Project (PDHRP), based at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, offers a novel and multi-tiered approach to the problem of harsh and unlawful deportations from the United States.  It is the first and only legal advocacy project in the country to systematically undertake the representation of individuals who have been deported from the United States. 

The PDHRP was conceived of and is directed by Boston College Law Professor Daniel Kanstroom, author of Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Harvard University Press, 2007).  It builds upon Kanstroom’s decades of experience defending immigrants in deportation hearings, training law students, and devising new legal strategies for addressing increasingly harsh and rigid deportation laws.  Legal work is overseen by Kanstroom and Supervising Attorney Rachel E. Rosenbloom, with assistance from Boston College law students.  The participatory action research project is directed by Prof. M. Brinton Lykes of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, Prof. Qingwen Xu of the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work, and Prof. Kalina Brabeck of Rhode Island College. 

The PDHRP has been formally endorsed by the American Bar Association, and has established working relationships with the Immigrant Defense Project, the American Immigration Law Foundation, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Families for Freedom, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations focusing on the immigration consequences of criminal convictions.  It also collaborates on participatory action research with a number of community-based organizations in and around Boston, including Centro Presente, Organización Maya K'iche, and Cape Verdean Community UNIDO, and has established connections with non-governmental organizations in Central America, Haiti, and Cambodia, as well as with consular officials from around the world. 

More information on the Post-Deportation Human Right Project can be found at the following link: http://www.bc.edu/centers/humanrights/projects/deportation.html.