| On the 27th episode of Immigration Today! Angeline Chen welcomes Amanda Schuft. Amanda Schuft is the Legal Services Director of Community Defense Programs at Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Immigrant Defenders Law Center is Southern California's largest deportation defense non-profit. They provide full‐scale deportation defense, legal representation, legal education, and connections to social services. Amanda has been a part of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center team for almost 8 years while serving various roles. Her focus is in representing adults who have been detained by ICE and who have been found incompetent to represent themselves through their National Qualified Representative Program. She is also the Directing Attorney for ImmDef's Deported Veteran Program where she helps veterans who have been deported with legal resources and post-conviction relief in an effort to eventually get legal status in the U.S. Prior to this, she was a staff attorney at Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project. She attended the University of Oregon School of Law.
Amanda explains how she always knew she wanted a career that was of service to people. Her mother was a teacher and would help vulnerable students better access the education system. Amanda became a bilingual teacher in Honduras for a year and eventually realized education was not for her. She pursued law school instead and eventually understood that there was a real need in the immigrant community to better access the legal system. Now she dedicates herself to representing individuals that are not competent to represent themselves in immigration court and has made huge strides in helping deported veterans come back home.
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