Legal Aid of Western Missouri aids migrant fruit-pickers with immigration expertise, mentoring

When attorney Suzanne Gladney surveys her field of prospective clients, she doesn’t see a field at all. She sees an apple orchard.

Actually, she sees some 40 square miles of rolling orchards in Lafayette County, an hour east of Kansas City. Each autumn, hundreds of migrant farm workers descend on Lexington, the county seat, to pluck, pack and ship Gala, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith apples until the chilly start of December.

These migrant workers are Gladney’s clients. The managing attorney of Legal Aid of Western Missouri, Gladney founded the Migrant Farmworkers Project almost three decades ago.

From the start, it was a challenging undertaking.

Any attorney providing pro bono work struggles with geographical, financial and logistical hurdles. Now add to those hurdles a language barrier, little-to-no access to phone or Internet and a client base that’s in the state only five months of the year.

“They are people who have trouble keeping up with any sort of system that requires notification to them of something, or mail,” Gladney said. “Often they have started something 10 years ago and really have no idea what happened to it because they were never at that address again.”

By the end of this month, 300 to 400 migrant workers will arrive in Lafayette County for the apple-picking season. The same group will leave in November and December to tend the citrus groves of Florida then hit two or three other farming locations throughout the year.

But the Missouri leg of their migrant stops is typically the longest, Gladney said. So she, her staff and volunteer attorneys hustle to get the farmworkers access to as many immigration, education and social services opportunities as they can in this four-month stretch.

“The majority are culturally Mexican,” Gladney said. “Some of them are born in Mexico. Others, now up to 45 percent, are born in the United States but have grown up living in Spanish-speaking households with Mexican parents.”

The legal project helps farmworkers to naturalize and become U.S. citizens, or ensure that their green cards, issued in 10-year increments, are kept up to date.

Over the past 10 years, Alex Solorio, an immigration attorney in Mission, Kan., has logged pro bono hours in Lexington helping with immigration questions and paperwork for the farmworkers. None of these consultations take place during picking hours, he said.

“[The project tries] not to get in the way of their employment, as that’s the main reason they’re here in Missouri,” Solorio said. “All activities are done … after they leave the fields in the late afternoon.”

The population has a personal connection to Solorio. His parents worked as migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley, picking lettuce, tomatoes and other crops. The work didn’t take Solorio and his family out of that state.

“I was fortunate, because you can span the Central Valley in a day’s drive,” he said. “We were able to follow the crops as the seasons changed.”

But Solorio said he remembers his father coming home covered in pesticide dust. Those memories and other injustices, such as farms denying workers long-handled hoes, inspired him to go to law school, he said.

“There’s a need for more attorneys that are Hispanic and speak Spanish,” he said. “What better place to make a difference than to be an attorney?”

Solorio, the pro bono chairman of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said a large portion of his volunteer work with the Migrant Farmworkers Project is mentoring farmworkers’ children.

“A lot of kids have never met an adult who’s doing anything other than picking fruit or teaching school,” Gladney said. “They just can’t see themselves doing any other career.”

Farmworkers’ children often attend school in three different states through the year, and they face the constant temptation to drop out, head to the fields and provide income for their families, Gladney said.

To keep students interested in school and focused on the future, the project organizes field trips to Kansas City-area colleges.

“It’s sometimes their first visit to a college campus,” Solorio said. “They don’t have any idea what college life is like. Some of them feel like they don’t have the potential to make it that far. I say: ‘Yes, you do. I did it. You’re not that far away.’”

One of those students, Dora, wrote a letter to the Migrant Farmworkers Project last year, typed from her dorm room at Kansas State University. “Every day is a challenge,” Dora wrote, noting that she piled on 15 credits and worked a part-time job each night from 7 to 11 p.m.

After winning a scholarship from the school’s Bilingual Education Student Organization, Dora majored in secondary education and hopes to become an English as a Second Language instructor.

“I remember clearly that the first time in my life I ever heard the word ‘college’ was in youth group,” Dora wrote. “Your assistance towards me and my family has changed our lives.”