Scholar Entries - Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund of Illinois

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Are you a past recipient of an Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund award?

Yes

Name

Laura Plata

Current Mailing Address

463 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
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If mailing address is temporary, expected date when current mailing address is no longer valid

07/31/2026

Permanent Address (only if different from Current Mailing Address)

16A Dundee Quarter Unit 205
Palatine, IL 60074
United States
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Phone

(224) 210-8881

Connection to Illinois

I am a native Illinoisan and continue to be a resident of Illinois.

In what city do you intend to practice law upon graduation?

New York City

Name of Law School

Yale Law School

Class year

3rd year law student

Full Time or Part Time Student?

Full Time

Date you began attending THIS law school

08/01/2023

Anticipated Graduation Date

05/23/2026

Current GPA

N/A Yale does not use a GPA grading school.

Law School Class Rank (if known)

N/A

Name of Undergraduate Institution

Yale University

Degree (BA, BSE, etc.) and Concentration/Major

BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics; Certificate in Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights

Undergraduate Graduation Date

05/01/2019

GPA

3.80

Undergraduate Honors, Awards, or Special Recognitions

Recipient of 2020 Rhodes Scholarship

Were you employed in 2025?

If yes, please identify your employer(s).

N/A

What was your immediate family’s (including you and your spouse or domestic partner, if applicable) estimated income from all sources for the 2025 Tax Year?

$65,000

Do you expect to be employed in 2026?

yes

If yes, please identify your employer(s).

Human Rights First

Please estimate your immediate family’s (including you and your spouse or domestic partner, if applicable) income from all sources for the 2026 Tax year

$86,667

Please estimate your parent's average annual household income over the last five years

$65,000 per year

Do your parents own or rent their home? Please describe, if necessary

Own

Describe your parents' health insurance situation. Do they have employer-sponsored health insurance, health insurance through the exchange, or no health insurance?

Employer sponsored health insurance

LIST below your total EXPENSES for attending law school for ONE YEAR (Please refer to example in FAQs)

Total Tuition Cost $

78,961

Books Cost $

1,300

Fees Cost $

444

Housing Cost $

11,800

Food Cost $

6,900

Other Costs $ (describe)

Personal expenses ($4,780); Transportation ($1,000); Hospitalization Coverage ($3,442)

Total Expenses $ (add above entries)

$108,607

LIST below your total FUNDING sources you plan to use to pay for these expenses (Please refer to example in FAQs)

Student Loans $

$20,500 per year

Scholarships and Grants $

$82,383 per year

Personal Contribution (Savings/Employment) $

Family Contribution $ (include parents, spouse, partner, etc.)

Total Funding $ (add above entries)

$102,883

For 2Ls and 3Ls, what is your current TOTAL loan debt from the previous law school years?

Approximately $50,750

Please list any community service activities with which you have been involved in the last ten years, paying particular attention to activities in support of the Hispanic community. For each activity, please include the dates of your participation, a short description of the organization and the community they serve, and a description of the activity you performed to help them. (Please read FAQs before completing)

1) Yale Refugee Project, Vice-President, Director of Immigration Group: New Haven, Connecticut [Aug 2016-June 2019] -YRP is an undergraduate student group devoted to serving migrant communities in the New Haven, Connecticut and broader area.
-Founded immigration and asylum branch of YRP. Created organizational structure through which students assisted
Connecticut Shoreline Indivisible prepare eight asylum cases by researching country conditions, translating
documents, and interpreting for clients.
-Recruited volunteers for JUNTA for Progressive Action to interpret for their legal office hours and clinics to inform
undocumented immigrants information on their rights in addition to forms of legal relief potentially available to them.

2) Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, Undergraduate Representative: New Haven, Connecticut [Aug 2017-May 2019] -ASAP is a nonprofit that provides free legal services to asylum seekers and also formerly had chapters at law schools across the country.
-Piloted volunteer program for Spanish-speaking undergraduate students to interpret for Central American asylum
seekers paired with law students providing filing asylum applications on their behalf.

Please provide a statement describing your background and focus your statement on your reasons for pursuing a legal career and your legal career goals. This statement is important. Please give it appropriate attention. (min. 1000 characters) (Please read FAQs before completing)

Sunday service at our local church ended in prayers for refuge. Supplications for cancellations of deportation orders or a pathway to citizenship filled the sanctuary. Growing up as part of a working-class, Hispanic immigrant community, my commitment to advocating for migrants’ rights developed in response to seeing undocumented members of my community live in fear of deportation. I knew that I had to understand the reasons they’d chosen to migrate to be better positioned to take action against the injustices they faced. Conversations with relatives in El Salvador helped provide insight. Over grim phone calls, they described how violence and political corruption threatened their daily safety. These forces, which once compelled my family and other Salvadorans to migrate during the country’s civil war, now threatened to displace a new generation of Central Americans. I realized that the issue wasn’t just one of demanding that migrants within the United States be offered a pathway towards legalization. Rather, the challenge was one of also ensuring that all individuals who were compelled to migrate—whether in search of refuge or opportunity—could safely do so. I saw pursuing a college education and going on to obtain a law degree as a crucial step towards this goal.

As a first-generation Hispanic college student, I often struggled with intense imposter syndrome, finding it impossible to articulate my own lived experience to my much more affluent peers. Reminding myself of the community that I belonged to and represented ultimately served to provide a powerful source of strength that motivated me to persist in the face of a challenging academic and social context. I devoted my time as an undergraduate to both the defense and study of migrants’ rights with a focus on forced migration from Central America. Across the arc of my experiences, I recognized the ways in which the law played a central role in both advancing and constraining protections for migrants. In co-leading a service trip to a Texas jail detaining Central American women and children seeking asylum, I witnessed how inaccessible the process of applying for asylum was for individuals in the absence of legal assistance. This experience acted as a catalyst that led me to found an initiative part of the Yale Refugee Project dedicated to supporting organizations providing legal assistance to asylum seekers. My desire to understand the political, social, and legal dimensions of these discourses drew me to pursue the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In my thesis work, I described the U.S.’ deterrence of Haitian asylum seekers as an extension of settler colonialism by historicizing the concept of the “nation.” I enrolled in the MSc in Political Theory Research the following year because I wanted to begin to answer the question, “What would a world that centered migrant justice look like?” Exposure to different frameworks for approaching questions of justice helped me articulate my view of migrant justice as both a matter of rights as well as the aspirational ideal of a world in which freedom of movement is respected.

It is because of my commitment to reforming existing immigration and refugee policy by decriminalizing migration that I am now pursuing a law degree at Yale Law School. For three semesters, I was a student-attorney in the Worker and Immigrant Rights Clinic where I gained first-hand experience employing legal research, writing, and advocacy skills towards the end of defending immigrants and low-wage workers. Following my graduation from law school, I will continue this work as a fellow at Human Rights First based in New York City where I will be documenting human rights abuses and rule of law violations experienced by individuals in deportation proceedings. My factual reporting will serve as the basis for future impact litigation seeking to address the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities. I hope to continue doing similar immigrants’ rights work in the future through a career in impact litigation with the aim of demanding a more just world for migrants everywhere.

Please upload a copy of your financial award letter labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.FinAwardLtr*

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Plata.Laura_.FinAwardLtr.pdf

Please upload a copy of your resume labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.Resume*

Please upload a copy of your law school transcript labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.LSTranscript*