Heller is director and co-founder of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, a pro-bono legal service for thousands of Iraqi refugees who need help resettling in other countries. Heller spends a lot of time in D.C. lobbying members of Congress. What is the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project?
The Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project is designed to enable law students and lawyers to provide assistance to Iraqi refugees who are in life-or-death situations and are trying to get to countries like the United States and Canada.
What inspired you to create the organization?
I was doing an internship in Israel between my first and second summers of law school, and at the end I decided to travel to Jordan to meet with Iraqi refugees. The refugee families I spoke to identified their primary need as legal. They would be killed if they went back to Iraq, but they couldn’t stay in Jordan because they couldn’t legally work, own property or obtain access to health care. Without any rights, they can only try to go to the U.S. or another country, but the process of who gets to go and who doesn’t is incredibly complex and difficult to navigate.
How did the organization grow from there?
When I went back to law school I basically co-founded this as a student group and started matching up students with refugee families that needed legal help. Then we started hearing from students at other schools who also wanted to help, and by the time I graduated a year-and-a-half later, we had chapters at nine other law schools. When I graduated, I decided to see if this was something that I could make into a real organization.
What now?
I’m quite anxious about the situation in Iraq right now, because the only way out of the country has typically been through Syria and that’s not possible anymore. So I’m looking at other evacuation channels for people who are in immediate or acute danger.
— Hayley Peterson
