Colombian-born Martha came to the U.S. at age seven, with her bilingual and bicultural traits that have been the key to her dual career of minister and lawyer. Immigrant children grow up with an extra layer of pressure to do well in school to avoid bullying and being laughed at. Surrounded by Spanish at home and English at school, she speaks both, accent-less, reads, writes, and inspires in both.
Her college B.A. in French from Middlebury College added a third language to her communication skills, helping prepare her for her legal specialty, Immigration Law. But after college, she married, followed her husband to his graduate degrees, had two children, and when a divorce loomed, applied to law school. With her son, age four, and her daughter, age 9, she enrolled at American University’s Washington College of Law, graduating with her J.D. and marrying again. The next year she passed the Bar and bore her third child, a daughter. Ready to begin a law practice with a newborn, was only possible from a home office where she was the boss and set her own hours.
Eventually she was on K Street as a Sole Practitioner, with a thriving practice which grew to represent hundreds of clients from 95 countries. She wrote articles on immigration law in Spanish for El Pregonero, a well-known local newspaper for many years.
Becoming known for her perseverance, she soon attracted more “impossible cases,” and developed a saying that “the impossible only takes a little longer.” One case took over 10 years for approval of a J-1 waiver, but succeeded in preventing a two-year separation for a couple, enabling them to have children. The Washington Post was instrumental in preventing another of her clients from deportation in 1998 when her story appeared, and she was granted the protective benefits of the Convention Against Torture (CAT). A newspaper comment called her “a lawyer with a heart.”
Active in Bar Associations, she was elected as the first Latina president of the Women’s Bar Association of D.C. and the next year won an award from the National Association of Female Executives as the outstanding woman for combining career, family and community service, featuring her life-story as their magazine cover story.
The hallmarks of her success as a lawyer were the caring and compassion with which she treated her clients. She counselled them through the crises in their lives, helping them to see the positive side of any hardship, to any negative judicial decision, even in moments of life and death. What provided that strength and understanding of those human problems? It was her spiritual training through her church which led to her next life’s work, the ministry. In December 2015 she was ordained as a minister in The Institute for Spiritual Development in D.C. And so she continues…