About Us
Our Mission
Mabel Center’s mission is to provide expert pro bono legal services to asylum-seeking families that have been separated, detained in family detention centers, and/or returned to Mexico upon seeking asylum at the southern border.
Mabel Center is justice in action. We believe that every human - regardless of status or place of origin - deserves the dignity and respect of legal representation.
That’s why we take on tough and complex asylum cases, representing women and children whose strength and resilience have allowed them to survive unimaginable violence in pursuit of safety in the United States.
Our Name
In September of 2019, founding attorney Jill Seeber was working with asylum-seekers forced to wait in Mexico, until their cases in tent courts along the border, when she met Mabel. Mabel had survived severe torture and abuse in her Central American country at the hands of military officials. After seeking safety and refuge in the United States with her daughter, the U.S. government returned them to one of the most dangerous areas in Mexico under the unlawful “Remain in Mexico” policy. While waiting in Mexico, Mabel and her 6-year-old daughter were kidnapped and held for eleven days under excruciating conditions.
Three months later, co-founding attorneys Jill Seeber and Daniel Santiago represented Mabel and her daughter, who were both granted asylum from a tent court in Laredo and permitted to enter the United States, where they now live with loved ones. The courage and resilience Mabel embodied is the inspiration for the Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit legal services organization that diligently and effectively fights to ensure that women and children fleeing violence and torture can find refuge in the United States.
Our History
Mabel Center founders developed the Family Detention Project within a legal services organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through the two-year project, they helped 130 mothers, fathers, and children fleeing persecution in Central America file their asylum cases with the Boston Immigration Court. With the urgent need for free and experienced representation expanding — while its accessibility diminishes under increasingly onerous asylum laws and procedures — Mabel Center’s founding attorneys decided to use their experience and specialized knowledge to create an organization dedicated to the skillful and efficient representation of complex and urgent asylum cases and assisting pro se asylum seekers. Mabel Center received its 501(c)(3) status in June of 2020.
Mabel’s first steps in the United States