I met Fatima* during my first week on the job. I had just been hired as a legal executive for an immigration solicitor in Ireland. It had been explained to me that one of my primary responsibilities would be to meet new clients, gather details about their stories, backgrounds, legal cases, and claims, and begin building cases grounded in their lived realities. Fatima was my first meeting of this nature. Having studied migration and asylum processes in university, and hearing the discourse about it so often in the media, I expected the meeting to be filled with legal terminology and procedural language so often associated with discussions of migration.
Instead, I was met by a woman eager to tell me about her children.
