Laís Ramirez Santoro supports immigrants through ABA and other opportunities
Laís Ramirez Santoro was perusing Paladin’s pro bono platform in January when she came across opportunities with the Safe City Baltimore Legal Screening Hotline.
Operated by the ABA Commission on Immigration, the hotline is available to noncitizens in Baltimore who need information, pro se services and referrals to legal services providers. Santoro, who graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 2023, answered its call for intake volunteers, who conduct the initial calls with noncitizens and gather information needed for follow-up legal assistance.
“This is where I’d done a lot of work and where I lived, and I still have so much love for Baltimore,” says Santoro, who is now a 2L at the Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia. “I also felt that given the state of immigration law in this country, it’s all hands on deck.”
Santoro, who was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, appreciated the chance to connect with and support other immigrants. She also liked the remote and flexible nature of the volunteer role, which allows her to schedule calls in between her classes.
“There’s always so much going on, but I will take calling a client and listening to them for an hour or so over reading a case for class, any day,” says Santoro, who already has completed multiple intakes for the hotline. “And the work will get done.”
A ‘backbone volunteer’
Santoro always has been engaged in her community. Growing up outside Philadelphia, where her family moved when she was a kid, she was part of the Girl Scouts and ran cross-country. She swam and was a swim instructor; volunteered at a local food pantry; and got involved in the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate justice organization.
Santoro was an active volunteer with several organizations while at Johns Hopkins, including the Hopkins Community Connection, which places students at hospitals and clinics to help patients access food, housing, heat and electricity. She often staffed the Children’s Medical Practice at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where she says most of the patients are children or mixed-status Spanish-speaking families.
She also discovered the Community Impact Internships Program. In interning at the Whitelock Community Farm, an urban farm in Baltimore, she learned more about food justice and equity efforts.
“I learned a lot about the law and policy behind land ownership and generational land loss amongst Black families, Black communities,” says Santoro, who earned a bachelor’s degree in public health and environmental studies. “And through that exposure, I was like, ‘Let me explore a potentially more legal-focused initiative.’”
Photo courtesy of Paladin.
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That led Santoro to the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, where she was an intern with the Home Preservation Project and the Maryland Immigrant Legal Assistance Project.
“Both my mentors for those projects, they were, excuse my language, bad-ass attorneys,” Santoro says. “I was like, ‘I think I want to do what they’re doing,’ and that’s when I started really considering law seriously.”
Santoro was particularly drawn to her work with the Maryland Immigrant Legal Assistance Project, where she helped with intake for asylum and visa applications and accompanied clients to hearings. She also worked as an interpreter during immigration court clinics and attorney-client consultations.
Cate Scenna, the director of the Maryland Immigrant Legal Assistance Project, was Santoro’s mentor and describes her service to attorneys and clients as going above and beyond.
“Laís was someone we would call a ‘backbone volunteer’ because they volunteer so often, and they also serve as the backbone to our legal services that are taking place during that period of time,” Scenna says. “She was that awesome.”
Making a connection
For Santoro, her work with the Maryland Immigrant Legal Assistance Project and now the Safe City Baltimore Legal Screening Hotline is personal.
Her dad came to the United States for work, and she realized at an early age how that made obtaining citizenship easier for her family, Santoro says. She now wants to use her skills in Spanish and experience with the law to help immigrants who face greater challenges in this country.
“I can do something about it,” Santoro says. “I’m obtaining a proper legal education, but even if I wasn’t, I am able to communicate in a way that makes people feel comfortable. I can be empathetic about what’s happening to them.”
“Once you’re able to connect with someone, it really makes a huge difference,” she adds.
The first step to getting assistance through the Safe City Baltimore Legal Screening Hotline is the intake process, notes Emily McCabe, the pro bono counsel at the ABA Commission on Immigration. That’s why it’s important that volunteers like Santoro understand how to ask callers the right questions and obtain relevant information without further burdening or traumatizing them, she says.
“It’s more an art than a science, and Laís has done a great job of getting the information we need without making this poor person go through their story again and again,” McCabe says. “It might be the first time they’ve told it, or it might be the 10th time, but it’s never easier.”
After graduation, Santoro may pursue immigration law. In the fall, she plans to do a practicum with the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s Immigration Defense Unit. But she also feels called to explore other public interest work and opportunities, including in plaintiffs litigation.
“I have two more years to take advantage of different practicums and externships, classes, things like that,” she says. “I will just keep trying things out as they become interesting and available to me.”
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