By Kimberly Chin

Operating in a room filled with stacks of paper, books, a white board with numbers and charts scribbled on it and a computer, Peter Markowitz was busy on the computer, pen in hand, before he turned. His desk was semi-cleared, but he still had paperwork surrounding him on his side of the table.

A glance around the room showed that behind him, tacked on a board, and amongst a bunch of papers was a heart cut out of red construction paper with the words, “I love you Daddy” and his son’s name scribbled on it. In another side of the room, a water paint drawing of a rainbow and a person was hanged very noticeably among the documents and papers of the wall.

Markowitz received his bachelor’s degree in government with honors from Wesleyan University in 1994 and was a Saul Tischler Scholar at Rutgers School of Law, a designation given to the number one rank in the first-year class. He was also suma cum laude at New York University’s School of Law and won a graduation prize for having the highest GPA upon graduation. He had won several awards during his schooling, including the Arthur Kinoy Fellowship which recognized his commitment to public interest work and the Sommer Memorial Award for “outstanding scholarship, character and service.”

His interest in the tedious work of law was sparked at a very young age, following his mother and sister’s steps of community activism. “I always found it [law] an amazing community for people to do that kind of progressive work and I always saw law as a kind of mechanism to do that.”

Markowitz’s interest in immigration law was something newer. His initial goal was to get into “big impact civil rights litigation.” He thought he would find his niche in the Center of Constitutional Rights, which was an organization centered on that type of litigation. However, he found the pace of the work slow and wanted more interaction with the people he wanted to defend.

His friend referred him to the newly-started immigration clinic at NYU. It was founded on the premises of his thesis that he wrote, Peter said, which combined the choices of “when to use litigation as an advocacy tool and when to use the whole other bag of tricks that lawyers can have and communities have, like organizing strategies, legislative strategies, media strategies, [and] all the sorts of things that lawyers do besides sue people.” From then on, he said, “I got hooked.”

With that under his belt, he was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship where he was placed with the Bronx Defenders, which was a public defender office. T the time, he also worked as a part-time staff attorney on the immigrant defenders project at the New York State Defenders association, according to his profile. He said his work was “great” there, and described his duties of defending non-citizens from unruly consequences and trying to reduce or eliminate those consequences. “For those clients that I can’t completely protect, I would go onto deportation defense as well,” he said.

Now, Markowitz does a range of work, which cross-sections immigration law with criminal law. “The intertwining of immigration and criminal law has been a phenomenon in the last two decades,” Markowitz said, as he shifted in his seat to elaborate on what he was saying. “It’s an area of importance in immigration law.” He added that not many people are invested in this kind of work.

Markowitz’s résumé of work that he was involved in, included a case called NCLR vs. Ashcroft, which challenges federal immigration officials for drafting local officials into “routine immigration enforcement duties.” The case, which is being handled in the federal courts, is pending an appeal. He had also dealt with an array of cases involving habeas corpus in the federal court to deportation proceedings which he has done in local courts.

All of his cases are almost exclusively pro bono, he indicated.

Markowitz works with students and community organizations to help, what he hopes, reform this “big problem” on a larger scale. He presently works with eight students at University’s Law School’s Immigration Clinic as attorney-in-charge, but said “we have a tremendous lot of work to do.”

Asked how he got his students interested in this line of work and he smiled and replied, “When they start seeing this not as some political issue, but as real people with real lives and some with real flaws as we all have…the pull of the work does its own morale boosting.”