Christina Brown is This Year's Gary L. McPherson Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year, 1019 COBJ, Vol. 48, No. 9 Pg. 81

AuthorBy BRENDAN BAKER
PositionVol. 48, 9 [Page 81]

48 Colo.Law. 81

Christina Brown is This Year's Gary L. McPherson Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year

Vol. 48, No. 9 [Page 81]

Colorado Lawyer

October, 2019

PROFILES IN SUCCESS

By BRENDAN BAKER

Christina Brown is a Maryland native, but years of working on political campaigns led her all around die country. While supporting the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign in Iowa, Christina took a weekend off to visit Colorado for the first time. As she traveled down I-76, a terrible thunderstorm kicked up, blowing giant tumble-weeds across the road. Driving into this chaos, Christina was struck with a sudden resolve: "I am going to live here!" And so she did.

Moving initially to Boulder, Christina worked for Jared Polis as an immigration constituent advocate, focusing particularly on education. She saw the roadblocks people ran into during the immigration process and noticed a lack of oversight to the immigration agencies. Her desire to help fix a broken system convinced her to go to law school. Unlike many future attorneys, Christina saw a specific legal need that she wanted to address, went to law school to focus on that, and actually managed to keep that focus throughout law school and beyond.

Getting to Work

After graduating from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 2013, Christina began working in the removal defense area of immigration law. She soon leapt on an opportunity to volunteer helping women and children held in immigration camps at the border in Artesia, New Mexico. She had intended to stay there just a short time, but she was hired by the American Immigration Council as the lead attorney on the project after three months. "It's like standing on a beach and watching a bunch of people drowning, and then being like, 'Well, I can save as many as I can in a week, and then I'm just going to leave.' And I couldn't. So I just stayed. I called my husband in Colorado and said 'I can't come back just yet.'"

She spent the next eight months managing hundreds of asylum cases and pro bono attorneys, first in New Mexico and then in South Texas. During this time, she was prominently featured in a New York Times Magazine article, in which she described the poor conditions and impossible choices faced by her immigrant clients and contacts. "I was overwhelmed and sad and angry. I think the anger is what kept me going."1

After that, she took some time off. "The talk about...

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