Whether they are a three-hour trek to the Eastern Shore or a 20-minute cruise down I-64, migrant worker camps are a world away from what students at the University of Virginia School of Law typically experience when working with clients.
Molly Keck ’24, a volunteer for the Migrant Farmworker Project, has heard stories of people drinking mold-contaminated water while working in sweltering summer heat and hand-washing their clothes after working in a field for 12 hours because there are not laundry facilities on site, but the housing conditions she saw herself troubled her the most.
“That might have been the most disturbing part of what I witnessed this summer,” Keck said. “I saw housing that had holes in the walls and floors, moldy mattresses, no indoor plumbing — just absolutely abysmal conditions.”
This is the first semester the project — a partnership between the Legal Aid Justice Center and the student-run Latin American Law Organization — has operated since COVID-19 shut the world down in March 2020. Before that, the project had been operating in some form since the early 1980s.
Keck has already had a summer’s worth of experience helping migrant workers.
She interned at LAJC over the summer, where she worked closely with Workers’ Rights Attorney Marissa Baer and visited dozens of migrant worker farms across Virginia. It only took one visit for Keck to solidify her career choice. She did not want to leave.
“I knew I wanted to try to get this project started again,”...
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