For Alex Gavern, it all started with a school bus, or rather a former school bus. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, to serve a year with AmeriCorps, working at a high school for nontraditional students. The school had started as a school bus that would drive to rural areas and provide education to children of migrant farm workers and continued to serve many students lacking permanent legal status.
“I saw how much their lives were affected by their – or their parents’ – immigration status,” Gavern said. “I was deciding whether to become a teacher or go to law school, and I felt that I could make the biggest concrete difference to a person as a lawyer.”
Gavern graduated from Michigan State University College of Law in 2014. From there, he worked variously in the private sector, as well as with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network as a pro bono coordinator and staff attorney. In 2021, he joined the YWCA Tulsa as a supervising attorney for immigrants and refugees, being named director of legal services in 2022.
“I have always been interested in immigration law because of the extremely personal nature of every case. There is little more personal to each of us than to be able to live near or see our families and to have a place to live safely. Those basic needs constantly run into the complexities of the U.S. immigration system,” he said. “The job of an immigration lawyer is to take their client’s story, understand their goals, and then help navigate a complex legal network to try to find a way to accomplish those goals.”
In his role at the YWCA, Gavern worked closely with The University of Tulsa’s College of Law, supervising students and providing legal services to Afghans who resettled in Tulsa in 2021 and 2022. It was from this collaborative work that Gavern was introduced to the university’s B.C. Franklin Legal Clinic, which immediately attracted him because of its unique mission and its connection to the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The clinic serves north Tulsa residents and businesses and accepts select immigration cases within marginalized populations. In July, Gavern joined the college as an assistant clinical professor.
“A community-centered approach is necessary for the work of the B.C. Franklin Legal Clinic,” he said. “A law school legal clinic can never be a legal aid, serving a large number of clients, but we can be intentional about the cases we take and work toward building an identity of service. Right now, that work is mostly focused on ensuring parental rights in state guardianship proceedings and ensuring that families in North Tulsa are able to pass their property down generation to generation.”