This webinar will review the forms of immigration relief including waivers of inadmissibility that require the applicant to prove hardship. We will cover non-LPR cancellation of removal, the waivers for misrepresentations, crimes, and unlawful presence. We will focus on the common hardship factors and how to craft a winning hardship case. We will also discuss working with your client, bringing forward creative evidence, gathering documents, and preparing your client for testimony.

Presenter: Lourdes Martinez, ILRC Staff Attorney

Lourdes, an immigrant herself, spent her childhood in central Mexico before moving with her family to the United States. Before joining ILRC, she worked as an immigration attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center in the DC metropolitan area, where she represented immigrant women and girls survivors of gender-based violence on immigration matters. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Rice University and her Juris Doctor from the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, where she was awarded the JB & Maurice Shapiro Public Service Fellowship for her dedication to public interest law. While in law school, she worked on international human rights litigation involving cases from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean both, with the International Human Rights Clinic at GWU and as a law clerk with the Center for Justice and International Law in San Jose, Costa Rica. She also worked with the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition, providing legal services and Know Your Rights presentations for immigrant detainees in Virginia. Finally, she spent a year with the Public Defender Service of Washington, DC, directly representing criminal defendants before the U.S. Parole Commission and drafting briefs for criminal court. Lourdes began her career in immigration law as a paralegal at Tindall & Foster, PC in Houston, Texas. She is fluent in Spanish and French.


Co-Presenter: Alison Kamhi, ILRC Staff Attorney

Alison is a dedicated immigrant advocate who brings significant experience in immigration law to the ILRC. Prior to the ILRC, Alison worked as a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic, where she supervised removal defense cases and immigrants' rights advocacy projects. Before Stanford, she represented abandoned and abused immigrant youth as a Skadden Fellow at Bay Area Legal Aid and at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York. While in law school, Alison worked at the UNHCR, the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, and Greater Boston Legal Services Immigration Unit. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Julia Gibbons in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Alison enjoys playing the piano and traveling. Before law school, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the rise of neo-Nazism and anti-immigrant sentiment in former East Germany. She has also lived in Russia, France, Cambodia, and Madagascar. Alison received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from Stanford University.