pangea legal services
What We Do
Community-Driven Campaigns
Working with community members on the inside and outside, Pangea leads public campaigns focused on individual cases and shutting down detention centers.
Community paralegals
Pangea’s organizers or community paralegals have a participatory defense model.
community wellbeing
Pangea embraces healing justice as a way to take care of each other and its community.
Know Your Rights & popular education
Pangea and Dolores Street Community Services lead the Asylee Legal Empowerment Partnership (ALEP) which trains pro se asylum-seekers in removal proceedings to represent themselves in court and win using their own skills, knowledge, and voice.
Our Story
Pangea Legal Services (Pangea)––named after the Earth’s original continent which was one large connected landmass––envisions a world where the human right to movement is respected. Pangea created a low-fee model supported by grants that has doubled its size, budget, and representation capacity every year from 2013-2016. Low bono, or affordable fee models similar to Pangea are growing around the country in various areas of law, creating a financially viable avenue to fill the justice gap. The structure and foundation of its programs are based on other projects it has seen firsthand in Sierra Leone, Turkey, Iran, Haiti, Argentina, Guatemala, and the United States. Pangea has resources for democratic governance as it has a horizontal structure with collective decision-making and everyone, including attorneys, paralegals and organizers, makes the same salary.
Pangea marries high-quality legal representation (primarily deportation defense) with community organizing in an effort to transform the immigration system. For example, the community-led deportation defense model provides high-quality representation and allows for clients to become agents of change. Public campaigns make space for community-led deportation strategies and advocacy creates space for communities to advocate for pro-immigrant legislation at different levels. Pangea creates space for its clients to become agents of change in their communities by connecting them with local grassroots groups and opportunities to share their stories with the public, media, and elected officials. Its goal is to educate, organize, and mobilize the approximately 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in Northern California to lead policy changes in support of a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants, and the closure of all immigration detention centers.
Pangea co-founded the Disability and Immigrant Justice Coalition (DIJC). The DIJC works with the community to identify and propose systemic change that addresses the unique needs of immigrants with disabilities, including but not limited to: making disability and healthcare resources and spaces more responsive and accessible to immigrants with disabilities; and ending the detention, solitary confinement, and institutionalization of immigrants with disabilities.
Pangea believes that immigrants hold the key to their own liberation, and that to create systemic change, people power is required.
Visit the Pangea homepage.