Two former law school classmates have joined forces to create a law firm dedicated to solving immigration problems for people who want to live and work in the United States.
Zainab Boxwala and Chelsea Zuzindlak, 2011 and 2012 graduates, respectively, of Wayne State University Law School, met in law school and worked together in the school’s Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic. That work inspired them to practice immigration law as a career.
Both women — founding partners of Boxwala Zuzindlak PLLC with offices in Michigan and Texas — have very different personal experiences that make them keenly aware of immigration issues.
“I am the daughter of immigrants,” said Boxwala, who lives in Cypress, Texas. “My parents came from India about 35 years ago, and since then, my extended family in the United States has grown to over 100 people. Many of my cousins and their spouses came to this country on visas related to their work and educational qualifications. Others came as a result of marriage-based petitions.
“My husband is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. I have firsthand experience with the realities of applying, waiting and anticipating responses from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services and other organizations on visa-related applications and processes.”
Zuzindlak, who lives in Madison Heights, gained her insight through travel and through the people she met in her life. As an undergraduate at Wayne State, she studied in Beijing in 2007 and also lived with a Chinese family as part of a cultural homestay program in 2008.
“I attended a Catholic middle school composed of students with predominantly Ukrainian and Eastern European ancestry,” she said. “Most students were first-generation Americans if not immigrants themselves. In high school, I spent nearly a month in the Philippines with a friend whose entire extended family still resides there.
“And in college, as a student of Mandarin Chinese, I began teaching English as a second language to Chinese immigrants in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. So, I was surrounded by individuals whose entire lives in the United States were shaped by a straddling of worlds with immigration-related experiences playing a significant role in how they managed their intimate and professional relationships. This provided me a global perspective of migration generally and provoked me to question the very concepts of citizenship and land borders.”
Wayne Law’s Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic, led by Assistant Professor Rachel Settlage, gave the two women as students a chance to represent clients, including devising strategy, researching key issues and filing briefs on behalf of people seeking asylum.
“The clinic solidified my career goals and provided me with the knowledge and confidence to apply for prestigious positions in the immigration field both before and after graduation,” Zuzindlak said. “Today, I believe a student’s performance in clinic is a better measure of that student’s competence and readiness to practice law than the bar exam. Since graduation, I have repeatedly recalled lessons learned in clinic to inform my strategy in a case.”
Boxwala, too, found her legal calling by working in the Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic.
“The immigration law clinic was by far the best experience in law school for me,” she said. “My role model for how to handle an immigration case is Rachel Settlage, our immigration clinic professor and supervisor. Her rigorous standards and high expectations of our professional work product forced Chelsea and me to perform our best.
“She set the bar high and encouraged us to meet it. The organization skills and attorney-client relationship management skills that we learned in clinic are what we incorporate into our practice today.”
After law school graduation, Boxwala, who holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Wayne State and a master’s degree in globalization from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, opened a private practice in Houston. Zuzindlak, who holds bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and Asian studies from Wayne State, went to work as an attorney advisor for the U.S. Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review in Detroit, supervising 12 legal interns. In 2014, she took a job in the Business Immigration Practice Group of Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP in Detroit.
“I liked the work, but the ‘big law’ lifestyle wasn’t for me,” she said. “I decided to start my own practice, and called Zainab for guidance.”
That conversation led to a decision to go into practice together.
Said Boxwala: “We knew that we were comfortable with each other’s work ethic and immigration law skills from our time together in law school. In retrospect, it was a natural progression in our professional relationship that occurred a few years after we both had a chance to gather valuable work experience.”
The women formed the firm in September 2015, and because immigration law is federal, they could work in separate states, communicating easily via technology.
“With two offices, we can reach out directly to more potential clients and contacts as attorneys who can assist them with their immigration issues regardless of where their jobs and life may take them,” Boxwala said.
The disadvantage?
“We don’t get to have lunch together,” she said.
The cases they’ve handled since forming their firm have included gaining labor certification for a foreign national previously denied and working with a company with offices in the Canada and the United States in the process of hiring foreign nationals for its U.S. branch.
Said Zuzindlak: “Earlier this year, we received an interesting case involving a student who was the victim of a fraudulent ‘pay-to-stay’ scheme brokered by an agent in New York. The scheme allowed foreign students to receive a visa and/or work permit in exchange for thousands of dollars in broker fees. The catch is that the school sponsoring the student did not actually exist, and the students were told they did not have to attend classes, which is an obligatory condition of real student visas.
“The school was in fact a sting operation conducted by Homeland Security investigations targeting and catching agents like the one who victimized our client.”
Arrests were made, and other students caught in the sting face deportation.
“We were able to secure for our client a form of relief called voluntary departure, allowing her to return to her home country and apply for re-entry to the United States at an embassy abroad,” Zuzindlak said.
She has volunteered her legal services at various citizenship clinics across Michigan and is working with Mai Family Services to help victims of domestic violence maintain lawful status through the U nonimmigrant program.
Boxwala also has volunteered her legal expertise to help victims of domestic violence obtain or maintain legal immigration status in the United States and has training related to the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals program and naturalization.
Both attorneys are proud of their immigration law work and how it helps others.
Said Zuzindlak: “I now have the ability to directly engage individuals and employers who simply cannot navigate the immigration maze by themselves. It is tough to change an entire system. I do not know whether America will ever achieve comprehensive immigration reform in my lifetime. I do know, however, that I am capable of changing people’s lives by helping them attain their immigration goals.”
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