Melody Saint-Saëns: Human Rights & Feminism

It truly hit home one day last summer just how important Melody Saint-Saëns’ work was. Saint-Saëns was an intern at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center’s LUCHA project, which provides legal assistance in immigration matters to indigent immigrant women and their children.

That day, she was conducting an interview with a woman to determine her eligibility for a self-petition to avoid deportation, which requires her or her children be victims of extreme cruelty or abuse at the hands of a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse.

The woman did not seem to have suffered anything extreme, but when Saint-Saëns asked about her child, the woman broke down. Her husband, it turns out, had been molesting their son for years, but the husband had threatened him into keeping quiet. It was only after help from his school counselor and principal that the boy broke his silence.

After that heart-wrenching experience, Saint-Saëns, now a 2L, knew she had to return to the LUCHA project. She applied for a H.O.P.E. Fellowship for this past fall semester to do just that. With a long list of UM achievements and sincere passion for LUCHA’s cause, Saint-Saëns was a perfect fit for a Fellowship.

A native of France fluent in Spanish, Saint- Saëns came to the UM Law School after an accomplished volunteer career at Wellesley College near Boston. Saint-Saëns said she was attracted to UM by the Center for the Study of Human Rights and “for its location in a diverse area where I could maintain my Spanish.”

As a 1L, Saint-Saëns joined the Center for the Study of Human Rights, and also the Domestic Violence Awareness Project and the National Lawyers Guild Juvenile Delinquent Project, which educates juvenile delinquents about their rights and criminal procedure.

As an offshoot of the Center, Saint-Saëns and some other students sought to create a human rights student organization and worked on it throughout the summer. The result was the Student Organization for the Study of Human Rights, which not surprisingly elected her president. As if that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, she tried out for the 2001 Public Summer Interest Fellowship and was one of eight recipients, which is how she ended up at LUCHA.

Saint-Saëns said her internship was the most rewarding summer job she has held. “It provided me with the opportunity to help women who were in dire need of assistance since they were both foreigners and victims of domestic violence,” she said. “For once, I could go home at night feeling exhausted but good because I had helped somebody.”

As a H.O.P.E. Fellow, Saint-Saëns will be able to provide an ever-increasing amount of legal assistance and expertise to her LUCHA clients. “The lawyer must make it a priority to delve further into the story and obtain the client’s version, since domestic abuse may be well-hidden from the public’s eye by the abuser,” she said.

Saint-Saëns is just the person to put in that kind of effort. After all, her clients’ plight is more than just part of her job, it’s part of who she is: “As a trilingual immigrant, feminist and human rights activist, I knew I could make a difference in these women’s lives.”