Canton High alum takes ‘path less traveled’

Twenty-five years ago, while finishing up a business degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Meredith Linsky made the conscious decision to follow her interests and set out on a “path less traveled.”

Meredith Linsky with her son, Gabriel

Young and idealistic with a passion for social justice, Linsky figured that she would never be rich and might not always be comfortable — and she distinctly remembers being okay with that fact.

“I felt a responsibility and an urgency to do something more than just take care of myself and my own family,” recalled Linsky, speaking via telephone from her office on the Texas-Mexico border. “I felt a need to make some sacrifices in my life as a young person.”

Fast forward to the present day, and Linsky, a 1984 Canton High School graduate, seems to be living just the kind of life she had envisioned for herself — one that revolves around helping the less fortunate and providing them with hope in the face of despair.

She does this through her work with ProBAR, the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, which provides free legal representation and education to the hundreds of asylum seekers who are detained each year in the Rio Grande Valley by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Based in Harlingen, Texas, ProBAR focuses its efforts on the people who have strong claims to asylum — those who have fled civil war, ethnic fighting, or religious and political persecution — but lack the means or the knowledge to successfully prove their case.

“A lot of what we do is the legal education piece and letting immigrants know what their rights are,” explained Linsky, who has served as ProBAR’s director since 2000. “It’s not just Mexicans who cross the border in south Texas; it’s also people from Africa — Ethiopia, Rwanda, Eritrea — all over the world really.”

During her time in Texas, Linsky has managed to help hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including many unaccompanied minors, escape persecution and find a home in the United States. A graduate of the University of California-Davis School of Law, she is widely respected in immigration law circles and has won numerous awards for her work, including the prestigious Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

Linsky, according to a statement issued by AILA, has been “tireless” in her advocacy for immigrants’ rights and has trained a “generation of immigration lawyers” who are currently practicing around the country.

And her commitment to human rights is not just limited to her work with ProBAR, as she also has extensive experience as a volunteer at various nonprofit groups, including the Cambridgeport Problem Center and the American Red Cross international program.

One of her first big volunteer opportunities had actually come in Harlingen about a decade before she joined ProBAR, with a group called Proyecto Libertad, which provides legal defense and advocacy for detained Central American refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

All three nations were embroiled in civil war throughout the 1980s, and Linsky, having become “very interested” in U.S. involvement and U.S. support of military governments in the region, decided to do her part to help the victims of these conflicts, working first as a volunteer and later as a hired paralegal.

She subsequently joined Witness for Peace and traveled to the southern tip of Mexico, where she worked on behalf of Guatemalan refugees who were planning to return to their homeland.

“It was very important for me to see what life was like in Latin America,” recalled Linsky of her time in Mexico. “I wanted to go see the conditions that people were fleeing from and I wanted to better understand their situation.”

“It was great on a lot of levels,” she added, “just realizing how much we have in the U.S. and how much people go through to have access to basic human rights and to things like justice and due process.”

Linsky’s commitment to these issues eventually led her to UC Davis, where she obtained her law degree while also spending time in San Francisco’s Mission District working on tenants’ rights cases.

She later returned to Texas, where she settled into a career and built a life for herself and her son, Gabriel, who is now 13. “I feel like this is where I can have the most impact based on my interests,” explained Linsky.

Part of the draw, she said, has to do with her own personal interest in the Spanish language and in Latin culture — an interest that was sparked in advanced Spanish courses at Canton High School and nurtured during a nine-month trip to Spain during her undergraduate years.

It was while in Spain, in fact, where Linsky underwent a “personal metamorphosis” and became politically conscious and “engaged in the world’s problems.” It is also where she acquired a mastery of Spanish, a skill that has “opened many doors” for her over the course of her life.

Nowadays, Linsky speaks Spanish as often as she speaks English, and she is able to navigate seamlessly between the worlds of educated legal professionals and poor detainees.

“Put me in a room with Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Maya Angelou or the Dalai Lama, or a recent immigrant from El Salvador or Ethopia, and I would feel comfortable with any one of them,” she insisted.

Linsky has also demonstrated time and again a willingness to step outside of her comfort zone in order to try something new — such as a recent sabbatical she took to Uganda in late 2011.

Volunteering with the American Jewish World Service, she was accepted and placed in a legal service office, where she worked for four months alongside Ugandan women lawyers.

“I saw a completely new culture,” Linsky said of her first-ever journey to Africa. “It was fascinating, it was challenging, and it was incredibly rewarding.”

She said it had been a personal dream of hers to make a trip like that, and just like she had done 25 years earlier as a college student at UMass, Linsky took decisive action and found a way to make it a reality.

“I would encourage people to find a way to accomplish their dreams,” she advised. “It was so satisfying to actually do it instead of just thinking about it. [The experience] was really inspiring.”

As for her advice to Americans who have no tolerance or sympathy for the plight of undocumented immigrants, Linsky commented, “The U.S. benefits economically to a great extent from undocumented laborers. These are people who generally work very hard for low wages; they keep our dinners affordable, and our car washes and our cleaning services.

“We are a country that prides itself on protecting vulnerable populations … I think a developing nation that believes in due process and liberty needs to have a system in place where someone can make a claim for asylum.”

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=20313

Posted by Jay Turner on May 2 2013. Filed under Features. Both comments and pings are currently closed.