Practitioner's Spotlight: Professor Niels W. Frenzen

• Publication year: 2014

PRACTITIONER'S SPOTLIGHT: PROFESSOR NIELS W. FRENZEN

In this edition of the Practitioner's Spotlight, we are proud to feature Niels W. Frenzen. Niels specializes in immigration law and is director of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law's Immigration Clinic. He has been teaching at USC since 2000 and practicing law since 1985. Niels has represented hundreds of asylum seekers and other immigrants, and has litigated numerous federal court cases challenging the mistreatment of noncitizens. He also has litigated national security cases involving classified evidence in immigration court. He has served as a delegate on behalf of Amnesty International USA, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and other human rights organizations.

Prior to joining USC, Niels practiced with nonprofit law offices in Los Angeles and Miami. He was the directing attorney of the Immigrants' Rights Project at Public Counsel, the supervising attorney at the Haitian Refugee Center, and the legislative coordinator of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. He also has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and Southwestern Law School. He received his B.A. from Beloit College and his J.D. from Drake University Law School.

Q: Good afternoon, Niels. Thank you so much for sitting down with us at The California International Law Journal and being part of our Practitioner's Spotlight. Niels, could you first tell us how you decided to become an attorney?
A: To a certain extent it was one of those situations that I suspect a lot of us have found ourselves in: I didn't know what else to do! I graduated from law school in 1985, and during both summers in law school, I worked at the Haitian Refugee Center, a community storefront legal office in the Little Haiti section of Miami established by a Haitian liberation theology priest exiled from Haiti. I had very firm, strong ideas about what I did not want to do and was less sure about what I wanted to do. This was in the early days of the Reagan administration and the beginning of mass incarcerations of immigrants. But it was the images of Haitian boat people behind barbed wire that caught my interest and my interest was to do something - I wanted to get involved and fight this, and it was not more sophisticated than that. When I look back over the last 30 years, that was what got me going.
Q: So when you decided to become an attorney, you knew that you wanted to work in immigration?
A: I did not. While in law school, I assumed I was going to be a criminal defense attorney. But I spent my summers during law school in Miami, at the Haitian Refugee Center, and that's what really captivated me - working with refugees and immigrants.
Q: And how would you describe the focal point of your interest in academia?
A: I'm a clinical faculty member, and so I am not a legal scholar, I'm a practitioner. But it all goes back to Haitian boat people in some respects, and what I've been working on now really since 2009, when I was on sabbatical leave, is following and writing about maritime migration, irregular migration by sea from Africa to Europe. It was something that I was vaguely aware of until I did my sabbatical working for a human rights office in London, an organization called Interights. I am a refugee lawyer

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