The Birding Immigration Lawyer

• Publication year: 2022

The Birding Immigration Lawyer

Tahmina Watson

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I dubbed myself "the birding immigration lawyer." Here's how it unfolded.

As immigration lawyers, we have been through so much. As if four years of the Trump administration weren't enough, the COVID-19 global pandemic really took it out of us. Suddenly, not only were we grappling with finding new ways to work from home, Zoom-school our kids, and live under lockdown, we were suddenly dealing with unprecedented and nuanced immigration situations.

Every case seemed complicated. Whether clients were stuck inside or outside the United States, whether cases were delayed because of the previous administration's policies compounded by COVID-19 standstills, each one seemed to present a challenge. Our stressful days seemed to have no end.

Little did I know that out of all that stress and turmoil I had develop an odd and unrelated new passion that would all but consume me and even get me thinking about changing careers. And it would start with something as simple as the chirping of a bird outside my window.

During those fraught Trump years, I had been leading the Response Committee of the AILA Washington Chapter and began daily meditations to help me find some sanity. The incessant need for immigration lawyers in frightened communities, all the while dealing with unprecedented changes in our caseloads, was overwhelming and left many of us feeling stressed and drained. It took time but I eventually developed a meditation practice that helped bring me a sense of peace and calm.

When COVID-19 hit, changing all our lives in dramatic ways, mediation didn't seem to be enough anymore—simply because life routines and the goalpost of stress had shifted. It was during this time that I happened by chance one morning to hear a bird chirping outside my home-office window. It was an unfamiliar sound, though I must have heard it hundreds of times before. My ears perked up. Listening to them inspired a curiosity in me to see the birds as they sang and flew from one bird feeder to another. My husband, who always worked from home, had been feeding birds for three years and had a system of feeders set up in the trees around the house. It attracted all types of birds. But life was so busy for me that during all that time, I had never really taken note. But now I was noticing. I listened to their melodious sounds, noticed their colors, the shapes of their beaks, their eyes, their wings as they flitted about. I...