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Vote for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid in the Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin Nonprofit category! http://bit.ly/49iep4

Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) attorneys Julie Balovich and Amanda Chisholm will be the featured speakers at Principle Voice’s 2009 Legal Conference on Polygamy.  The two will review their work in Eldorado after the raid on the YFZ ranch in 2008.  Complete information, including how to register, are available here.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said he believes the practice of so-called “child bride” marriages within polygamous societies has been halted.

“I’m quite confident that the practice of child-bride marriages has effectively stopped in this state,” he said in an interview Tuesday with KSL NewsRadio.

Shurtleff said to date, his office has had no direct evidence that any underage marriages are being performed in the polygamous communities within the state.

To read the entire article, click here.

After years of funding shortfalls, legal aid societies across the country are being overwhelmed by growing numbers of poor and unemployed Americans who face eviction, foreclosure, bankruptcy and other legal problems tied to the recession.

The crush of new clients comes as the cash-strapped agencies cut staff and services.

The nonprofit Legal Services Corp., which funds more than 900 legal-aid offices nationwide, says that the number of people who qualify for assistance has jumped by about 11 million since 2007, because of the recession. Roughly 51 million people are now eligible for assistance — individuals and families who earn less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level, now set at $27,564 a year for a family of four.

To read the entire article, click here.

They could have done anything, really: hit the beach; lay out by the pool; play video games; go to the movies; goof off.

But three University of South Carolina students foreswore the typical activities of college students home for the summer and decided instead to spend the best part of their break helping migrant field workers reach for a better life, the kind of life USC rising seniors Anna Walton, Kyle Warren and Rachel Wright already enjoy and want to share.

To read the entire article, click here.

Judy Cooper hired temporary foreign workers to help out at her Flat Top Mountain fruit and vegetable farm for three years, and this year she received a break on their wages because of a regulation from the closing days of the Bush administration.

But starting today the U.S. Department of Labor will suspend the regulation for nine months so officials can re-examine the federal H-2A program, which allows U.S. agricultural employers to hire foreign workers.

The Bush regulation, which went into effect Jan. 17, reduced the required hourly wage paid to foreign workers.

To read the entire article, click here.

In the fall of 2007, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid started getting complaints on its voicemail system from clients that it
had no record of in its files. Around the same time, people began showing up at its offices in San Antonio, El Paso,
and Austin asking for attorneys who didn’t work for the organization. “That is how we realized what was going on,”
says Cindy Dyar, an Edinburg, Texas based staff attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “It wasn’t a mistake.
People weren’t getting confused. They were getting scammed.”

To read the entire story, click here. *Note* You must have a subscription to American Lawyer to read the story.

Feature Story: The Power of Pro Bono

A new federal law provides protection to tenants of foreclosed rental properties and may help apartment dwellers such as those on Sonesta Drive and Sonesta Circle who received eviction notices last week.

President Obama signed a new law, the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act of 2009, on May 20, attorney Robert Doggett, of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid in Austin, said Wednesday.

The law states that valid leases continue from one landlord to another if a property is foreclosed upon, as long as the tenant stays current with rental payments, Doggett said.

To read the entire story, click here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Spring Miller, Attorney
615.750.1200
smiller@trla.org
Cynthia Martinez, Communications Director
512.374.2764
cmartinez@trla.org

JACKSON, Mississippi – June 17, 2009 – The  Mississippi office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has fined Simmons Farm-Raised Catfish for its failure to report an outbreak of a drug-resistant staph infection (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) among its employees in 2006 and 2007.

OSHA launched an investigation of the Yazoo City company in response to a complaint filed by two guestworkers who became ill while working for the company.   The workers are represented by Southern Migrant Legal Services (SMLS), a project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, and by Mississippi attorney Brent McBride.

According to SMLS attorney Spring Miller, OSHA recordkeeping requirements help ensure that workers and public authorities know about workplace hazards and can take appropriate steps to address them.

“Workers deserve to know what risks they face in the workplace so they can protect themselves effectively,” Miller said.

The Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor is still investigating a wage complaint filed against Simmons by former guestworkers last year.

SMLS is a project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) based in Nashville, Tennessee that provides free employment-related legal services to migrant farmworkers who work in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Established in 1970, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc. (TRLA) is a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services to low-income and disadvantaged clients in a 68-county service area. TRLA’s mission is to promote the dignity, self-sufficiency, safety and stability of low-income Texas residents by providing high-quality legal assistance and related educational services.  For more information on Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc. and this story visit www.trla.org.

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