Remembering Elizabeth Frankel

Elizabeth Frankel

Advocate. Waymaker. Friend.

Elizabeth Frankel joined the Young Center in late 2009. She was just the third full-time employee of the Young Center, becoming part of a trio of attorneys who would develop and implement an entirely new model for advocating for the rights of immigrant youth.

Liz’s first responsibility at the Young Center was to develop a Child Advocate program in Harlingen, Texas. Every month she flew from Chicago to Texas to get the office off the ground. She met with community members, developed a core of volunteers, and took cases. Over several years, she gathered the seeds of a community that today numbers in the hundreds: a team of attorneys, social workers, paralegals, volunteer coordinators, and volunteers who stretch across the Rio Grande Valley and who have dedicated years to advocating for children detained along the U.S.-Mexico border. She earned the respect of a community that viewed the arrival of a Chicago-based organization with a healthy and appropriate amount of wariness. She earned it through the respect she showed experts and community members; but perhaps even more so because of her relentless and zealous advocacy on behalf of children detained in Texas. 

Liz brought a depth of expertise to her work at the Young Center. She studied under both Randy Hertz and Marty Guggenheim at the NYU Law School of Law, where her work in the clinic distinguished her among her peers. She clerked for Justice Susan Calkins of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine and then began working at a law firm, where she devoted a substantial amount of her time to asylum cases. There, she successfully represented a woman who just this year applied to become a U.S. citizen, a process that began well over a decade ago when Liz first took her case. Before law school, Liz joined Teach for America and spent two years working with children in the Bronx. 

One of Liz's earliest cases at the border involved a child who had been trafficked into the United States for sex. The teenage girl had developed a trauma bond with her trafficker—she thought he was her boyfriend. Liz and the child's volunteer advocate worked with the girl for months to understand her story and her perspective, and to help the child re-establish communication with her mother and family in home country who loved her and feared for her safety if she were to return. Because of Liz, that child now resides safely in the United States. In another early case, Liz won the release of an elementary-school-aged child who had been denied reunification with her own mother. The case was considered impossible, but Liz refused to give up until the government agreed to release the child to her mother. In yet another case, immigration officials intended to dismiss the claims of a deaf child rather than take the steps necessary to ensure they could understand the child's story. Liz intervened and demanded an entirely new procedure that would accommodate the child’s disability. That child also won permission to remain permanently in the United States. In another case, Liz found a case worker willing to travel to a tiny town in El Salvador and meet with a woman who had been coerced into sending her son to his abusive father in the United States. With that case worker’s evidence, the child was returned to his loving mother, with a safety plan to protect both of them in the future.

Time and again, Liz proved that every straight line could be bent, and that no label had one single meaning. She took our first referral of a vulnerable child from the very agency that sought the child’s removal, engaging in a complex analysis of children's rights, parental rights, and legal ethics, before submitting a best interests recommendation that was adopted and supported by the DHS trial attorney, the immigration judge, and the child's own attorney.

Elizabeth Frankel with Maria Woltjen, Carly Salazar, and Jennifer Nagda at the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Young Center’s office in Harlingen, Texas, in January 2020.

Because of Liz, our program in Harlingen grew quickly, and today it is the largest in the country. In 2013, the federal government decided to expand the Young Center’s programs, and required that we create six new programs in less than two years. It was by all accounts another impossible task. And yet Liz got it done. Time and again, she managed to recruit and hire some of the most talented and creative staff to be part of the Young Center. She flew to and would spend time in new program sites, persuading stakeholders of the value added by child advocates, creating alliances one at a time, slowly and carefully, and with great attention to details and relationships. Liz believed in everything that she did, and her transparency, integrity, intelligence, professionalism and kindness won countless admirers.

But while doing all of that, Liz worked to better understand our field and to have a greater impact on the lives of young people. Early on, Liz recognized that some of the most vulnerable youth in our system are teenagers, often boys, who are caught between the worlds of juvenile justice and immigration. She was quick to accept referrals of young people facing the most formidable odds: children sent to immigration detention after being accused of delinquent acts or even crimes. She embraced their cases, arguing that they deserved as much attention, if not more, than the very young children and children designated as victims who are typically referred to the Young Center. In 2011, she published an article written to help other attorneys navigate the complex intersection of juvenile justice and immigration. 

She brought that same passion to teaching. For four years, Liz taught in the Immigrant Child Advocacy Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. She helped students grapple with their very first cases. She coached them in interviewing young clients, developing evidence across languages and countries, and writing briefs that were finely crafted, strategic, and tailored to the audience. Over the years, countless students wrote to Liz to thank her for mentoring and inspiring them and providing their most meaningful experience in law school.

Liz was living in Chicago when she first learned that she had cancer. She dove into her fight in full lawyer mode: she researched, developed a plan, got creative, and then stayed singularly focused on getting healthy. And while she was periodically out of the office, she never truly stepped away. She managed her cases, oversaw staff, and kept up warm and loving relationships with her community of friends. All of that was possible because of the incredible support of her own family, who constantly flew to Chicago to be at her side.  

Liz with members of Young Center-New York team.

In 2015, with cancer behind her, Liz started thinking about returning to New York to be closer to the family she loved so much. She left behind an incredible team of talented lawyers and social workers in Chicago, including Jajah Wu, Marisa Chumil, Kelly Albinak Kribs and Marcy Phillips, who learned child advocacy at Liz's side. When she moved, she became the driving force of the Young Center’s New York team, while continuing to oversee offices across the country. Liz was instrumental in hiring Gladis Molina Alt, whom she had first met during her time in Harlingen, when Gladis was a staff attorney at ProBAR. It is because of Liz that we are privileged to have Gladis leading the Young Center’s Child Advocate Program. Liz also recruited and hired the women who became the first interdisciplinary team to lead a Young Center office: Shaina Simenas and Priscilla Monico Marín. With Liz’s critical, hands-on support, they have advanced our understanding of an interdisciplinary practice in support of children's rights.

Every Young Center protocol traces its roots back to Liz. She was unabashedly dedicated to protecting children's rights, and particularly their right to be heard, their right to be free from detention, and their right to be with the grown-ups they love. But she was also the first to admit she didn't have all the answers. Liz pioneered our collaborations with experts in legal ethics and in other complex areas of the law. She consulted with anyone she could on any case she could. Those who were on the receiving end of her questions knew that Liz would be relentless in trying to get to the bottom of a complex situation. It took a certain degree of courage and determination to take a call or meeting with Liz to discuss a case. There were no 15-minute conversations. Every issue would be on the table. But you never doubted that her rigor (and your exhaustion) was for the right reasons. Today, Liz's model of in-depth collaboration across fields of expertise with the singular, shared goal of advancing a child's rights, serves as the basis for all of our best practices.

And she never stopped fighting for kids. Liz and her team spent more than a year fighting for a pair of siblings who came to the United States to get to their mother who lived in Canada. Rather than quickly escorting the children to their mother, the U.S. government detained the girls for over a year.  Liz and her team had to fight for the girls just to have calls with their desperate parent. Because their case was not “typical,” reunification in Canada was presumed to be impossible. Liz refused to accept that outcome and worked with her team to persuade decision-maker after decision-maker to do the right thing. Today that family is together.

Liz was a lawyer's lawyer. She was so good at uncovering a client's story, and finding the evidence needed to persuade an official to act in the child's best interests. She was singularly gifted when it came to ascertaining the motivations of stakeholders, so gifted that she could speak to their concerns and persuade them to consider the world from her perspective. She was so nimble on her feet in court, with the press, in the offices of Senators, speaking on a stage in front of hundreds. She was endlessly curious about the world around her. In her time at the Young Center she traveled across the country and around the world for work, going to Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Australia to meet and connect with experts in children's rights. And she cared deeply for her clients. She once took a leave of absence to represent a young adult whose case was rejected by every attorney Liz reached out to. She simply could not allow a young adult who had experienced so much injustice as a child to experience the very worst of both the immigration and criminal justice systems on her own.  

Liz loved her colleagues, and she loved the Young Center. She gave her heart and soul to the organization. But what made her colleagues and friends happiest was the balance she found with her partner Tom and her stepdaughter Katie, and in being so close to her mother Joan, her father Michael, her sister Sarah, and her brother Jonathan. To those who watched their relationship grow from a distance, there could be no doubt that Katie found a fairy stepmom in Liz; they adored each other. In Tom, Liz found an incredible (and hilarious) partner.

In March 2020, as the United States was coming to grips with the reality of the Coronavirus, Liz learned that her cancer had returned, and she took a leave of absence. This cancer was much more aggressive, as were her treatments. Liz left the city and turned her attention to the biggest fight of her life. She fought cancer like she fought for kids: with unwavering focus, determination, creativity, and love. She was very much in the middle of that fight in January of 2021, when a cascade of medical events cruelly took Liz from this world before anyone had a chance to say goodbye. 

If not for Elizabeth Frankel, there would be no Young Center. We will miss her at every complex case rounds, every all-staff retreat, every happy hour, every child advocate training, every contract negotiation. Perhaps most of all, we will miss her incredible laugh; a laugh that came from the heart and invariably caused everyone around her to smile and laugh with her. As we continue our work, we will endeavor to uphold her legacy, her commitment to young people, to the truth, to collaborative but zealous advocacy, and her attention to detail in each case we undertake, in each protocol we develop, in each paper we write. We are so deeply grateful for and honored to have had the opportunity to work at her side.

Liz with Young Center staff at the 2017 ABA Conference on Unaccompanied Immigrant Children.

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