Grantee Spotlight: Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry, a program of St. Francis Community Services

People come to seek legal advice and services from Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry (CLAM) by word of mouth, passed business cards, or from the walls of bathroom stalls in correctional and detention facilities. Past clients give out the contact information for the agency located in downtown St. Louis to friends, loved ones, and neighbors so when they find themselves in a vulnerable position or interacting with the legal system, they know that help is there, whether it’s a traffic ticket, domestic or family situation, or high-stakes hearing before an immigration judge.

Each client comes with a story and complex needs that the black and white letter of the law may not encompass. CLAM staff say this creates a snowball effect that puts a person at even greater risk of being pipelined into the legal system long-term when the initial cause was a relatively minor infraction like a traffic offense. And these situations disproportionately impact the poor, the unhoused, veterans, immigrants and refugees, and other vulnerable members of the St. Louis community.

While many clients find their way to the agency via referral or word of mouth, for others, their first meeting with CLAM’s dedicated attorneys comes by chance. CLAM’s Managing Attorney, Amy Diemer, recalled one such encounter. Stymied by the complexities of the courts as she tried to get a fresh start in life, the client had broken down, sobbing outside a courtroom. As Diemer, who happened to be at court that day for the order of protection docket, asked the woman some simple questions—“Are you okay? Can I help you?”—the other woman’s story poured out. From that first conversation, she became a client and CLAM successfully resolved her situation.

"We really care that every single person that we work with, from the top to the top down, really, really cares about the people that are coming to us, and that we feel that it’s a privilege to hear about what their situation is, and to have them be open enough with us to try to help resolve their issues,” Diemer explained. 

"You know, the reality is that the way of the world is unfair. I could promise you that 25 lawyers walked past this woman crying in there before Amy stopped and asked her how she was doing,” Wade Chatfield, the agency’s manager of operations, said. “Most systems in place that our clients encounter are unnecessarily difficult.”

In recent years, helping immigrants and refugees with asylum and immigration cases has become CLAM’s largest department, presenting the agency with new opportunities to effect change while also bringing with it new challenges. CLAM is one of a handful of agencies locally that offer help with asylum defense cases.

"Those are probably the most difficult cases,” Diemer explained, “because there’s just so much significant trauma that goes along with what happened to the client in their home country—the terrible path it took to get to our border, the terrible way they were treated at the border, being placed in detention, not understanding what’s happening and then being released without really knowing where they should go or what they should do. And so then, when they finally reach our door, then it’s a long time before you really can get to the heart of the legal matter.”

One man’s story exemplifies why the agency has embraced this difficult work. CLAM represented a man in deportation proceedings who had been in the United States for decades. In that time, he had married, had children who were American citizens, and had gone on to have a successful career as a school counselor. The man had come to the attention of immigration authorities due to a minor criminal matter. Unless CLAM could prove that the man’s deportation would cause undue hardship, he would have been sent back to his country of origin. CLAM attorney Kris Walentik successfully argued the man’s case, after the agency pulled in support from specialists who provided key evidence of the devastating impact the man’s deportation would have on his family. Without those extra efforts, the man would have been ripped from his loved ones and from the community where he’d made his home for so long.

Making it their mission to break these pipelines and destructive cycles of spiraling encounters with the legal system, CLAM provides its clients legal advice and advocates for change at the local and state level. Support from partners like the Marillac Mission Fund enables CLAM to go forward with its work and to be there for its clients across the St. Louis region for years to come.

"Our agency is about long-term relationships with people because things don’t get fixed in six months,” Karen Wallensak, former executive director of St. Francis Community Services, explained. “It is not unusual across our agency to have people whose cases go back two, three, four, five years, sometimes even longer. We always say we never want to have to break a promise to a client because we don’t have the money to fulfill it. But that’s an enormous challenge.”

"The beauty of Marillac is that their values and mission are aligned with ours,” Wallensak continued. “They get us, you know. It’s more than the money. There’s peace of mind. It’s reliability, trust, respect—these really important things that are less tangible and will not come out in data.”