The Immigration Project expands with Springfield office

An immigrant advocacy organization that recently opened a Springfield office is celebrating its expansion of services with a public event June 12. 

The Immigration Project, which provides legal and social services to noncitizens and undocumented immigrants in central and southern Illinois, began operating in the Wabash Building, 1999 Wabash Ave., in March. The organization will celebrate the opening from 5-7 p.m. June 12 at the nearby Dublin Pub, 1975 Wabash Ave. Guests will have the opportunity to learn more about the organization and talk with immigration experts over food and drinks. RSVP at https://tinyurl.com/3hxd6wp2.

Formed as a nonprofit entity in 1995, The Immigration Project’s headquarters is in Bloomington-Normal and it has a satellite office in Champaign-Urbana. As a nonprofit organization, it primarily attains funding through a variety of sources, including grants from foundations, organizations, government agencies, corporations, and individual donors. Specifically, they’ve been supported by groups like Yield Giving, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), the Chicago Community Trust and the Vera Institute of Justice, among others.

The organization has served immigrants in Springfield for 30 years, said executive director Charlotte Alvarez, but the new Springfield office will enhance services. 

“In the past, we relied on the generosity of community partners,” said Alvarez. “Our attorney would come into Springfield and be housed at Catholic Charities for the day. But having the office here has allowed us to have that long-term stability. It also expanded our reach for social services, because we provide immigration legal services and social services support. Having that brick-and-mortar location allows more clients to come in.”

The Immigration Project provides immigration legal services, including those related to citizenship, general family-based immigration, survivors of trauma, detained adults and unaccompanied minors. It also offers social services, connecting clients to community referrals and resources, and conducts information sessions and “know your rights” sessions, both virtually and in person.

The services offer noncitizen residents in the United States and undocumented immigrants proper legal pathways to permanent residency, help for them to adjust to new living situations and navigate the ever-changing immigration law, especially within President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. 

The organization has legal representatives in Kankakee, Peoria, Carbondale, Bloomington-Normal, Urbana-Champaign and now Springfield. It covers 86 counties and provides assistance in English, Spanish and French. 

“Our team does a kind of circuit-wiring approach where we have legal advocates and attorneys who will go to consultations and clinics throughout the state,” Alvarez said. “We do workshops to help people apply for citizenship, asylum and temporary protected status in those cities and in other places like Beardstown, Fairview Heights and Moline. So our model is to meet people where they are, span the whole state with services and be able to have that connection with folks in person, then we’ll do the rest of that work from one of our office locations.”

Alvarez said the new Springfield office has made it significantly easier to conduct workshops and connect with small communities, especially Beardstown, where the non-native-born population is an integral part of the local economy and workforce. 

Connecting with these communities, particularly those downstate, is important because of the frequent lack of legal help or understanding available to these struggling families. 

“A lot of people who have these negative ideas about immigration are based more on myth and tropes than on reality,” said Alvarez. “Oh, why can’t they just get in line? Well, most immigrants who are in our state, over 1.8 million, are documented, right? They’re lawful permanent residents, but of the individuals who are undocumented, some of them are in lines that are just too long and stuck in processes that the U.S. government has created, which just don’t work. We work with survivors of crime and trauma, who have cooperated with the police to help make our cities safer by getting abusers off the streets and reporting crimes that have happened, then we can help them apply for something called a U-Visa to get status based on that cooperation. But the wait list for a U-Visa is over 15 years long.”

For more information about the organization, visit: https://www.immigrationproject.org/ 

This article appears in Juneteenth 2025.