· ACLU of Montana · By ACLU Montana · From the Border Crossing Law Firm media archive.
Accepting the ACLU of Montana's Jeannette Rankin Civil Liberties Award, Shahid Haque reflects on representing more than a thousand immigrants through deportation cases, marriages, permanent residence, citizenship, asylum, and family reunification. He dedicates the award to undocumented Montanans for whom the law offers no path, and asks the audience to stand with immigrant neighbors facing heightened fear in 2017.
The speech is a personal account of Shahid's first decade of practice and the relationships behind the firm's public cases. Rather than treating the award as an individual achievement, he used it to make a promise to people he could not yet help and to invite other Montanans into that responsibility.