Project: Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) Family Detention Project. Dilley, TX. Provides free civil legal services to asylum-seeking women and children who are detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC).

Tamara Shamir is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in English and Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights. Tamara is originally from Israel but has lived in Texas since elementary school. Her interest in immigration law was shaped by a summer internship in Monterrey, Mexico, where she provided humanitarian aid and legal orientation services to newly arrived migrants by the tracks of “El Tren De Muerte” (the freight train often used by US-bound migrants). For the past two years she has interned at De Novo, a center for public law in Cambridge, where she drafts asylum claims for immigrants in the greater Boston area. Tamara is interested in the asylum system’s treatment of forms of persecution which have not been formally established in US immigration law and is committed to forging legal pathways for survivors of gender-based violence within the asylum system. This summer, she is thrilled to work remotely with Texas Rio Grande Aid’s Detention Aid Project, which provides legal aid to women and children imprisoned in a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.

On campus, Tamara enjoys playing viola in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and chamber music ensembles, teaching music to low-income high school students through PBHA, writing for the Harvard Political Review, and running along the Charles River. She is a Peer Advising Fellow for first-year undergraduates and the women’s outreach chair for Seneca, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women on campus.

After her senior year, Tamara plans to continue her commitment to public service by working with immigrants on the Texan-Mexican border before attending law school to study immigrant rights.