One by one, the students clambered out of a university-issued van and into the brisk March air. They grabbed their backpacks, laptops, file folders and printouts, and filed into their office for the day. 

As members of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s immigration law clinic, they’d made the three-hour trek from the capital city to North Platte to offer free legal counsel to families at HOPE-Esperanza, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to serving North Platte’s immigrant community. With the majority of Nebraska’s immigration attorneys based in Omaha and Lincoln, the North Platte trip offered a rare opportunity for one-on-one consultations close to home.

“We’re kind of like motorcycle mechanics,” said Kevin Ruser, UNL law professor and director of the clinic. “We’re trying to figure out what’s wrong, and if we can fix it.”

For the next five hours, the students welcomed people looking for answers. 

The work was exhausting. Several students served dual roles as lawyers and interpreters, switching between Spanish and English and back again at a rapid clip. By the end of the night, the clinic’s team had given legal advice to 24 families. The group exchanged tired smiles, pleased with the number of people they’d helped. But the success was bittersweet.

Several weeks before the North Platte event, Ruser announced he’d be stepping away to focus on classroom teaching. The immigration clinic would close with his departure.

The news, first reported by Nebraska Public Media, sent shockwaves through the state’s immigration ecosystem. Questions about the timing came quickly: Was political pressure responsible for the closure?

The truth is more straightforward.

“I’m getting old,” Ruser said.

The law professor started teaching at UNL in 1985, and created the immigration clinic in 1998. He’s watched the program expand from two students each year to eight, and shift from primarily deportation defense work to more affirmative actions, like securing visas for victims of violent crime or undocumented kids who’ve been neglected by a parent.

It has allowed students to learn the ropes in real time — nurturing both the foundational skills necessary to practice law, and the more specialized expertise of immigration law. And it’s served as a homegrown pipeline of immigration attorneys for Nebraska, which struggles to attract out-of-state talent.

But after 40 years of going full-throttle, Ruser is ready to step back. He’ll be teaching an immigration law course next year. Richard Moberly, dean of the law school, said the university is working to develop external learning opportunities for students in the meantime.

In a different financial landscape, Ruser’s decision wouldn’t necessarily spell the end of the clinic. But UNL has weathered a series of difficult budget cuts and faculty reductions over the last year, intended to address a structural deficit.

The law school had two tenured professors accept buyouts as part of that process, and because they taught a required first-year course, the school needs to prioritize hiring their replacements. Hiring an additional professor to oversee the clinic isn’t in the cards, at least for the time being.

“It’s hard because they’re still paying me,” Ruser said. “I’m still slopping at the public trough here, right? They haven’t gained a line by me changing my teaching focus … I feel awful about it, but not awful enough not to go through with the deal.”

Kristin Mohrman still remembers the sting of rejection she felt when her application to join the immigration clinic was denied.

Mohrman, an Omaha-based immigration attorney, attended UNL’s law school from 2002 to 2005. She’d come from the University of Kansas, where her dreams of becoming a human rights lawyer flummoxed advisers.

“That’s why I was drawn to immigration law … I felt like, gosh, I don’t know how one becomes a human rights lawyer,” she said. “And it seems like something that is reserved for someone who is not me, this little Midwestern girl, so I guess I’ll have to find the next best thing.”

Her first internship with the Douglas County Public Defender’s Office, she said, opened her eyes to the fact that there were many human rights issues within her own community, including immigration issues. Mohrman, who speaks Spanish and Portuguese, said she was eager to use her language skills to help others.

But back then, the immigration clinic only accepted two students a year. Mohrman didn’t make the cut.

Mohrman instead ended up in the civil clinic, also taught by Ruser, and still ended up working in immigration law. It’s become a longstanding joke between the two.

More than a decade after she was turned away, Mohrman suggested Jessica Valdez give the clinic a try. Valdez, then a paralegal, had been inspired to pursue a career in immigration law after an experience as an undergraduate at Creighton University.

On a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, Valdez and her fellow classmates went to the fields to pick crops alongside migrant laborers. It was an eye-opening experience for the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

“My dad worked in the fields, and that’s how he was able to get his residency through the farm workers’ program,” she said. “But I didn’t really understand and appreciate it at the time, because I was so young. He made it sound very amazing … But when we were there, I was like, ‘this is horrible.’”

Valdez took a five-year pause between undergrad and law school, working as a paralegal. By the time she enrolled at UNL, the immigration clinic had tripled the number of students it accepted each year. She was accepted into the clinic last fall, and became one of its final participants.

“Even though I felt like I knew so much, the more I learn, the more I feel like I don’t know — there’s so much more that you can learn,” she said. 

Working alongside Ruser and her fellow classmates has left Valdez confident she’ll be ready to serve clients post-graduation. But she’s concerned about what foreclosing this opportunity could mean for the state in the future, noting that just last year the state turned its prison in McCook into an immigration detention facility.

“If we don’t have a program that will foster that kind of passion, what does that mean for the immigration attorneys in Nebraska? Are they going to dwindle down? That is a big worry for me, what that’s going to be like for the immigrant population in Nebraska,” she said

In the last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Nebraska have skyrocketed. Mohrman has had to turn clients away because of capacity issues, and she knows other immigration attorneys face similar problems. While the number of immigration attorneys in Nebraska has grown, Mohrman noted it hasn’t kept up with demand — and the clinic’s closure may exacerbate the issue.

“And then, of course, the larger ripple effect is the impact into the community,” she said. “Because the clinic serves people who can’t afford attorneys, and there’s always a great need for that. It’s just kind of this domino effect right there.”

Even before the closure announcement, the current climate around immigration enforcement complicated the clinic’s work. For six years, the clinic’s students, alongside other law school volunteers, ran a naturalization event helping eligible immigrants apply for citizenship. But when the clinic announced the 2026 date, it received only one application.

If people are eligible for naturalization, Ruser said, they shouldn’t be scared of ICE. But fear of attending a publicly advertised immigration event had already seeped into the community. Ultimately, the event was canceled due to a lack of interest. 

The immigration clinic is one of nine clinics offered by the college of law. Those clinics offer third-year students the opportunity to represent real clients, under the guidance of supervising faculty members. Moberly, the law school dean, said the clinical programs have grown significantly since 2017, jumping from four to the current nine. With the loss of the immigration clinic, the university will offer eight.

Moberly said that when Ruser came to him requesting a change, he looked at the law school’s overall offerings. 

“When we looked back over several years, not all of our clinical seats had been taken,” Moberly said. “I felt like we had some room where we could still meet student demand, even if we didn’t offer the immigration clinic.”

The college is working to solidify external learning opportunities for students interested in immigration law, where they will work under the supervision of outside attorneys. Moberly said they’re in the process of developing five or six different opportunities with the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement, which counts several clinic graduates among its staff. 

More than anything, Ruser said, the clinic was an opportunity to let students get real world experience before they began practicing on their own. 

“And so it’s unfortunate that this clinic is going away, but we’ve got a lot of clinics here where they’re learning stuff, and there are people that are practicing immigration law here today in this state that never took this clinic, and they’re really good practitioners,” Ruser said.

Moberly didn’t dismiss the possibility of reviving the immigration clinic at a later date, but noted that with further state investment unlikely, it would take private investment. The dean confirmed he’s been exploring the idea of fundraising for the clinic.

“Our First Amendment clinic is through private philanthropy,” Moberly said. “Our children’s justice clinic was created through private philanthropy. Our housing justice clinic, private philanthropy … So our community has supported clinical education, I think, because it’s a great educational experience for our students, but also because it impacts the community, and I would love it if people wanted to support an immigration clinic.”

For now, the clinic’s time is coming to a close. Ruser and his students have passed clients on to other practitioners and nonprofits in the state, including CIRA, the Center for Legal Immigration Assistance and the Nebraska Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence. They’ve hit the road, traveling to North Platte and Wakefield to offer as much help as they can before the semester ends.

“I’m going to miss the students. I’m going to miss the clients,” Ruser said. “But I think at the end of the day, the question is, are we going to have more immigration lawyers? And I think we will, because the bar is growing. It’s going to grow to meet the demand … But I hope the legacy of this clinic is that they’ve learned how to practice law and be better lawyers.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/a-big-worry-closure-of-unl-immigration-law-clinic-raises-concern-about-nebraskas-legal-landscape/