Pro Bono Spotlight 2023: Kelli Meilink

Staff Report//November 10, 2023//

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Husch Blackwell, Kansas City

Kelli Meilink and her Husch Blackwell colleague Jenna Brofsky led their firm’s significant involvement in a partnership with the Afghanistan Emergency Assistance Project and the Jewish Vocational Service of Kansas City to help refugees seek U.S. asylum after the 2021 fall of Afghanistan’s government.

Meilink focuses her practice on business immigration law and put her experience to good use and she and Brofsky trained and mentored 49 Husch Blackwell attorneys, summer associates and staff members across the country in how to prepare and review applications for filing with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“Applying for U.S. immigration status should be easy,” said Meilink. “But the process is so complicated that it’s almost inaccessible to people unless they have an attorney.”

Ultimately, the large project ended up helping more than 50 people through the complicated asylum application process, which wasn’t made easier by language barriers, different cultural norms and recent trauma.

She earned her law degree from Seton Hall University in 2011.