This film tells the inspiring story of Luis Cortes Romero, the first undocumented attorney to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
VOCES “From Here/From There (De Aquí/De Allá)” airs Monday, July 22 at 10 p.m. on WXXI-TV
Follow Luis – an immigration attorney as well as a DACA recipient’s – on a journey from a difficult youth to the highest court in the land as part of a powerful legal team fighting the Administration’s attempt to rescind DACA.
Luis was attending a school for gifted students when he discovered he was undocumented when he couldn’t join a class trip to Europe, leading to his father’s deportation and his family’s upheaval. This hardship and his mother’s direction led Luis to Chicano Studies at San Jose State, where he would become an immigration lawyer.
When the Obama administration established DACA in 2012, Luis’s life changed, allowing him to practice law openly, and in 2017, he defended Daniel Ramirez, a DACA recipient facing deportation, and recognized the broader threat to DACA. This led to a landmark Supreme Court case where Luis, the first undocumented lawyer to appear before the Court, and his team won a victory in 2020, overturning the Trump administration’s rescission of DACA. Despite this win, the future of DACA remains uncertain, affecting hundreds of thousands of young people.