Third-year law student, Jennifer Barker, spent two months this past summer interning for Florida Legal Services’ Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. Her principal duties were researching case law and investigating violations of workers’ contracts, wages, and other violations under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act and Fair Labor Standards Act (AWPA/FLSA). “The Project is a small operation, but it provides an enormous service to an under-represented group. Because they are non-English speaking immigrants, they are often unaware of their legal rights and of the resources available to them to protect their rights.”

Fluent in Spanish, Jennifer was sent out on several fact-finding trips around Florida and southern Georgia. Her most interesting trip was to investigate a call from the Mexican Consulate regarding a farm that was withholding wages, providing inadequate living and working conditions, and using threats and intimidation to prevent workers from leaving the farm. Jennifer spent a week, with a paralegal from the office, taking pictures of housing, recording hours worked per day, and interviewing the workers. Her inspection has contributed to a class action suit against the farm.

Previous to this summer, Jennifer had received two grants from UM Law, one from through the Children and Youth Law Clinic and another from HOPE, for fellowships with the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC) and the Miami Workers Center. As a fellow with FIAC, she assisted immigrant women applying for permanent residency through the Violence Against Women Act. At the Miami Workers Center, she researched welfare and poverty law. Jennifer also assisted Professor Martha Mahoney with research for a book she was co-authoring on public interest law.

Jennifer received her bachelor’s in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1997. Between Ann Arbor and Miami, she lived in Oaxaca, Mexico where she worked as an English teacher, grant writer, and a health project coordinator. Jennifer is originally from Toledo, Ohio.